Greetings cybernauts! I am a doctoral student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, working with the Learning and Intelligent Systems group. My advisors are Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez.
My current research is on cooperative planning for assistant agents, with a focus on creating better sidekicks for video games. You can get a flavor of this research from this paper, which won the best paper award at AIIDE2012. I was recently awarded the 2013 Eric Dybsand Memorial AI Scholarship by the IGDA Foundation, in collaboration with the AI Game Programmers Guild, which recognizes promising students in the field of AI.
My secondary research focuses are social network analysis, computational models of moral reasoning, and static analysis of probabilistic programming languages. I did some of this work with the erudite Whitman Richards, who advised my masters thesis, and some with the Computational Cognitive Science group, led by Josh Tenenbaum.
I help teach a course on video game development with the MIT Game Lab, formerly known as GAMBIT, and am working on a grant from them for my game sidekick work. I also occasionally give talks there and am an organizer for the GAMBIT Summer Summit.
Before coming to MIT I was a research assistant at the University of Sydney's Key Center of Design Computing and Cognition, now called Design Lab, where my advisor was Mary Lou Maher. My research there focused on smart environments and using virtual worlds for cross-disciplinary design work.
In my spare time, which I don't have as much of as I used to, I try to cram in as much geeky gaming as possible, work on my own game development related projects, and participate in the Boston Indies scene.