I am currently a doctoral student in computer science at Oxford studying under Samson Abramsky and Bob Coecke; previously, I completed my master’s in pure math at the Courant Institute at NYU, where my research involved applications of geometry and topology to artificial intelligence. For my thesis, I’ve been exploring different ways of applying category theory and sheaf theory to computational learning theory, from work on the sample compression conjecture to diversity measures in boosting. My interests include category theory, computational learning theory, sheaf theory, robotics, and art history.
Currently:
- I work with Jeff Ding on AI markets and AI governance. Preliminary discussion paper here; more forthcoming.
- I work with Sokwoo Rhee and other members of NIST on indicator frameworks for smart cities.
- I work with economists and game developers on the in-game economy of Seed.
- I’m part of the executive team at Compositionality, a new peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal dedicated to compositional ideas in science and mathematics, especially those with a categorical origin.
- I edit a book series with Bob Coecke called Applied Category Theory, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Email us if you have an idea!
Previously:
- I helped teach a course at Harvard called Governing Virtual Worlds, with Lawrence Lessig and Elettra Bietti.
- For the academic year 2018-2019, I was based at Princeton as the Fleet Visiting Fellow from Magdalen College.
- Eliana Lorch and I wrote a blog post for the n-Cafe, on the behavioral approach to systems theory.
- In 2018, I organized Applied Category Theory 2018 with Brendan Fong, Bob Coecke, John Baez, Aleks Kissinger, and Martha Lewis. As part of the workshop’s activities, I participated in the ACT School 2018 in Pawel Sobocinski‘s group, where we discussed how to use cartesian bicategories to formalize ideas in Jan Willems’ behavioral approach to dynamical systems.
- As part of an NSF fellowship program, I worked with David Spivak and his lab at MIT on applied category theory, specifically on categorical approaches to data integration and to complex systems modeling. I also worked with Spivak and Andrea Censi on category theory for co-design problems (slides from my talk at UPenn), a broad class of optimization problems.
- At MIT, I co-founded a “living lab” with the City of Boston and three MIT startups called the Local Sense Lab. We won the GCTC Leadership Award in 2016, plus a $10,000 novelty check.
- During my M.S., I worked with Misha Gromov on the mathematical foundations of AI. I wrote my master’s thesis on (highly speculative) connections between cohomology and learning, which I’m trying to develop in my doctoral thesis.
- Before math, I worked in robotics at ScazLab, where I helped program robots in several human-robot-interaction experiments.
- Before robots, I studied art history at Yale (technically, I majored in EP&E and humanities), where I wrote my senior thesis on the sublime.
I am currently collecting my thoughts and questions into a summary of my research (the first version was my master’s thesis); any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! The paper is modeled on this paper by Andreas Holmstrom.