I am the co-founder and owner of Quimba Software, a research and specialty software development company in the San Francisco Bay Area. My technical interests include statistical learning and knowledge representation. I am also interested (at a layperson’s level) in cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics.
I am generally interested in how to apply computer science techniques to explain (and more ambitiously, to understand) human activity. This includes applications such as understanding a web user’s search or shopping activity, a person’s movie, restaurant, or music preferences, or how a design engineer’s activity relates to his or her design goals (a project I worked on at SRI). While these types of applications are generally approached from a statistical learning framework (quite successfully, in many cases), I believe that truly ambitious attempts to computationally explain and support human activity must be informed by a comprehensive model of that activity.
Numerous models of various human activity exist in the cognitive and behavioral sciences, however, these models are often built and studied under focused lab conditions, and generally do not have the quantitative detail needed for use in computational applications. So I am constantly on the hunt for opportunities to collect (or beg, or borrow, or steal) data that will enable researchers to build models that can be used in computational applications.
Most recently, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Dr. Larry Beutler and Zeno Franco from the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, who are interested in training tools and training curricula for disaster managers and disaster mental health responders. Through our current NSF-funded project, I am hoping to have the opportunity to collect data on how disaster managers might do their job, and communicate with each other, in catastrophic disaster situations -- that is, situations where standard procedure and existing disaster response plans may not be adequate to respond to the situation.
When I’m not working, I dance.
