meg aycinena lippow




I have just finished my Ph.D. at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where I worked with Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez (LIS lab homepage). I got my B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford in June 2003.

In August 2010, I started as a software engineer with Google in Mountain View, CA.

research interests

I'm interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision. For my thesis, I'm working on using probabilistic geometric grammars to represent and recognize classes of objects and scenes in images.

While an undergrad at Stanford, I worked with Nils Nilsson on hierarchical relational reinforcement learning, and with Pat Langley and Dan Shapiro on hierarchical reactive cognitive architectures.

papers and presentations

  • Margaret Aycinena Lippow. "Weighted Geometric Grammars for Object Detection in Context." Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2010. pdf
  • Meg Aycinena Lippow, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, and Tomas Lozano-Perez. "Learning Grammatical Models for Object Recognition." In Proc. Daghstuhl Seminar on Logic and Probability for Scene Interpretation, February 2008. url pdf (short version of the following tech report)
  • Meg Aycinena, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, and Tomas Lozano-Perez. "Learning Grammatical Models for Object Recognition." MIT CSAIL Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2008-011, February 2008. pdf ps
  • Meg Aycinena, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, and Tomas Lozano-Perez. "Learning Grammatical Models for 2D Object Recognition." Presented at the NIPS-2007 Workshop on the Grammar of Vision: Probabilistic Grammar-Based Models for Visual Scene Understanding and Object Categorization, December 2007. ppt pdf
  • Margaret A. Aycinena. "Probabilistic Geometric Grammars for Object Recognition." S.M. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, August 2005. ps pdf
  • Pat Langley, Daniel Shapiro, Meg Aycinena, and Michael Siliski. "A value-driven architecture for intelligent behavior." In Proc. IJCAI 2003 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling of Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions, pp. 10-18, 2003. ps

    • teaching

  • Discrete mathematics instructor, Women's Technology Program, summer 2009.
  • Computer science instructor, Women's Technology Program, summer 2008.
  • Teaching assistant, 6.825 Techniques in Artificial Intelligence, fall 2005.

    • other

  • "Aycinena" is pronounced phonetically, according to Spanish pronunciation rules: "I-see-NAY-nah". The origin of the name is Spanish Basque. "Lippow" is pronounced "LIPP-oh".
  • I sing with the MIT Concert Choir. In a previous life, I sang with the Stanford Harmonics.
  • My mom writes a great newsletter about the EDA industry.

    • contact

    office: 32 Vassar St. 32-G585, Cambridge, MA 02139
    email: aycinena followed by 'at' followed by csail dot mit dot edu