.: biography :.

I'm currently a graduate student studying robotics and artificial intelligence at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Computer Science. I'm a member of the Learning Agents Research Group, which is led by my supervising professor, Peter Stone. I'm also an active member of the Reinforcement Learning Reading Group and the Agents that Learn from Humans Reading Group. In Fall 2010, I will be entering the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab under the supervision of Cynthia Breazeal.

My primary research interest is robotic learning that harnesses human guidance and reinforcement. More generally, I'm interested in social robotics, reinforcement learning, and multiagent systems. I recently completed my undergraduate degree in the Turing Scholars Honors Computer Science Program. My thesis was titled "Exploiting Human Motor Skills for Training Bipedal Robots", and the framework I developed can be seen in this video.

In the summer of 2009, I worked as an intern at TRACLabs Inc., where I got the opportunity to build a robot from the ground up. I have also been an intern at Amazon.com, a research fellow at the University of Virginia working on computer-aided geriatric gait analysis, a senior student associate at Applied Research Laboratories, and even started my own web design company in high school.

My entire immediate family are professional musicians, so music has always played a big part in my life. I started playing the cello when I was three years old, and since then I have picked up guitar and piano. I also enjoy speaking German, snowboarding, running, biking, and playing racquetball and tennis.