I am a 5th-year PhD candidate at Northwestern University, working on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Dr. Doug Downey in the Web-Scale Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (WebSAIL). I am deeply motivated by my quest to discover first principles that govern the manifestation of what can be considered intelligence (and not just the human type). Toward that goal, I use Deep Learning (DL) techniques as well as Bayesian Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to devise algorithms that learn from large unstructured data to assign accurate probabilities to events.
Currently, to gain an understanding of what constitutes intelligence, I study human behaviors in social settings to glean insights into how individual intelligences may get abstracted away into collective intelligence. More specifically, I am focused on testing two hypotheses: that credibility scores can be assigned to social network users by training ML algorithms on their predictions (e.g., team X will defeat team Y) and that the scores can be used for the prediction of future events and for the prediction of predictions. To drop some related buzzwords, my area of research can be aptly classified as overlapping both Data Science and Computational Social Science :) My past research analyzed search engine bias: the degree to which differences across search engines’ rankings of search results correlate with features of the ranked content, including point of view (e.g., positive or negative orientation toward their company’s products) and advertisements. While I did not find evidence that the engines favor their own company's products, I did find evidence of their bias toward certain news sites and toward their own advertisements versus those of competitors. Further details can be found in my 2014 publication at SIGIR, the top conference in Information Retrieval (IR), which is also something I specialize in. I have recently become very passionate about Game Theoretic explanations of intelligence, which have spurred an increasing amount of research. I am also very interested in Neuroscience, Psychology and pretty much everything that can help understand why a robot like Daneel is so far from reality. Also, it's been 16 years since 2001. What gives? |