"It's that moment of dawning comprehension that I live for." -- Bill Watterson
I'm a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Irvine; I work with Padhraic Smyth. My area of concentration is artificial intelligence: specifically, I use techniques from machine learning and data mining to create predictive and descriptive models for social network data, with an emphasis on networks that evolve over time. I'm also interested in the design, analysis, and optimization of data structures and algorithms (especially for networks, i.e., graphs and hypergraphs); reputation models; information organization and retrieval; and mathematical modelling.
As of May 2006, I'm also an Applied Researcher at Microsoft's Redmond campus, researching and developing technology relating to spam, phishing, reputation, reliability, performance, and security.
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History
During the summer of 2004, I worked at Hewlett-Packard Labs (Palo Alto) in the Information Dynamics Lab, developing and applying my link prediction model for social networks.
In February 2003, two other graduate students and I founded JUNG, a free and open-source Java API for representing, manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing graphs and networks; it was first released in August 2003. Since that time I've continued to be one of JUNG's lead architects, developers, and providers of technical support. (I'm quite proud of this project; recently (Oct 2005) it's been ranked among the top 100 SourceForge projects--which is pretty good for a software library competing with instant message clients and games--and it has been downloaded more than 30,000 times.)
In September 2001, I became a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department of the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.
From September 1999 to June 2001, I was a Ph.D. student in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Oregon. I transferred to UCI in 2001 so that I could pursue my interests in artificial intelligence-related topics.
I received my M.Sc. in April 1999 from the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of British Columbia; my Master's thesis, completed under the supervision of Richard Anstee, was in algorithmic graph theory.
My B.A. was granted in June 1994 courtesy of the departments of computer and information sciences and mathematics at the University of Oregon.
At various times, I have held jobs in research, software engineering, technical support, technical writing, and galaxy design (for a science-fiction strategy game called Stars! Supernova Genesis; unfortunately, Mare Crisium apparently ran out of money before they were able to release it).