I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. I received my A.B. in Physics from Harvard (1990) and my Ph.D. in Physics from M.I.T. (1994). I stayed at M.I.T. for two more years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Biological and Computational Learning, then joined the research wing of AT&T Labs in Murray Hill (and later Florham Park), NJ. In 2002, I joined the faculty of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, I joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. I am also one of the members of the Computational Statistics and Machine Learning Group (COSMAL).

My main research interests lie in machine learning, pattern recognition, voice processing, and auditory computation. My work is supported in part by an NSF CAREER Award. In 1999, Technology Review named me as one of 100 top young innovators. In 2001, I was a founding member of the editorial board for the Journal of Machine Learning Research. I also served as Program Chair for NIPS-03 and General Chair for NIPS-04. My students and I have won outstanding paper awards at international conferences in machine learning (ICML-04), computer vision (CVPR-04), artificial intelligence (AISTATS-05), and neural information processing (NIPS-06).

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