Look Who's Talking!

Meet Dr Emma Brunskill
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Interview by CS Undergraduates: Dixie Kee and Young Jae Park

Tell us about your background. Where are you from?
I did my undergraduate at the University of Washington. I did my Ph.D. at MIT, and I did a Masters at Oxford University between that. Then I did my Post-doc at University of California, Berkley.

When I was growing up I moved to a lot of different places, mostly Seattle which was where I went to college, but also England when I was a kid growing up, and Iowa, Georgia, and Australia as well. My parents had different job opportunities so we moved around a lot. We didn’t live anywhere more than two years when I was growing up.

Which places were your favorites?
It is a hard one to decide [laughs]! I spent a summer in Japan and I really enjoyed that. I also loved my later trips to India, Rwanda, Peru, and China. I have loved almost everywhere that I have traveled to. In general, when I get to stay in a place longer, I like that place more. For instance, I like noticing what time of day people eat lunch… and, more generally, learn about day-to-day life in a new place.

What is your first impression of Carnegie Mellon as a professor?
Oh, it is great! CMU is fabulous, and I am really excited to be here. People are really nice and very welcoming. I have spent some time in CMU before too. I visited a couple times before I interviewed and before I moved here.

Why did you pick Carnegie Mellon over other colleges for your first faculty position?
CMU’s an amazing institution for computer science so I was delighted to get a position, and also I really loved my interview here.

What are you currently researching, and what is your favorite project so far?
I am a brand new faculty. I have only been here a month and a half so I am just getting started, but my main area of research is decision making under uncertainty. So how do you make sequences of decisions when you don’t know the exact outcome of those decisions? And that comes up a lot in robots, but in other applications as well, and one of the applications I’m really excited about is education. You can think teaching as an instance of decision making under uncertainty. You don’t know whether or not a particular activity will help someone learn so that’s one application area I am really excited about.

For example, we made a simple tutoring system which we used in a field study in 2  schools at Bangalore, India. The idea of this research was to customize the activity given to each student by keeping an online estimate of what students know and don’t know. Based on this information, we use a decision making under uncertainty algorithm to decide what questions to give to the student.

Have you always wanted to be a professor? Did you ever consider going into industry? Why did you end up picking academia?
I have wanted to be a professor for a long time. I guess since I was maybe about fifteen, I thought the idea of continuing to do research would be really, really cool, and the idea of getting to mentor students and be a teacher also really appealed to me.

I have also thought about doing other things in college. I went through a lot of different career ideas when I was growing up. During college I mostly knew that I wanted to do graduate school and do research. I thought about going into non-profits before because one of my side interests is how do you use technology for international development, so I thought about joining a nonprofit that does that stuff.

During my masters at Oxford, I had a number of friends studying international development and that was the first time I knew people that were really thinking about that stuff. And I thought that sounded really interesting, but my background was technology and I really liked computer science, so I thought: how could I possibly combine this? So I did an internship in Rwanda. It was my first introduction to using computer science for international development. There, it was mostly about providing computers to students, but I got interested in that area and tried to continue to do work in that during my grad school sort of on the side. So I’ve been aware of a number of different initiatives in this priority for a number of years. I always thought that some of them do some really cool work, so it was one of the other options I considered.

I did not really consider going into industry. I thought about going into research labs, though. Those are wonderful, but I didn’t think about joining industry directly.

You have done Physics, Computer Science, Neuroscience and Robotics through your academic career so far. Why so many fields? Has doing Physics and Neuroscience helped you with what you are currently doing?
Yeah, so that’s a good question. I started off and I thought I was going to do a Physics Ph.D. So I was doing physics and computer science, and I had a really wonderful professor during undergraduate. I did some operation systems research with him which I really enjoyed, and he strongly encouraged me to consider staying in computer science. I decided to go to CS grad school at MIT and that was when I got introduced to A.I. I had never done A.I. before I started grad school. I thought that was amazing, and I thought I was only going to do one Ph.D. [laughs], so it better be something I’m really excited about.

Neuroscience was because I thought it would be interesting to get a biological understanding of the biological basis of intelligence. It doesn’t directly influence my work right now, but I think it may in the next coming decades.

How did you end up doing what you are doing right now? Was it hard to decide?
I knew during grad school that I find the issue of how we make decisions under uncertainty really interesting. As part of my masters in neuroscience, we had to do research, and my project there actually was along the same lines in that how do humans make decisions when stimulus is ambiguous. You know the cubes where you can view each face on the side? Have you ever seen those where they are ambiguous figures, so you can either see it as one face is forward, or one face is backwards, or sometimes you can see structure for motions of dots that are moving. You can either view it as moving to the left or moving to the right. They’re ambiguous and they are useful in neuroscience because they are a stimulus that people perceive in different ways even though the stimulus is the same, so it gets into our basis of how do we make decisions. I thought that was really interesting because it’s fascinating how you make decisions when there’s complete ambiguity. So then I did decision making under uncertainty for grad school. I also was interested in international development and applications aimed at poverty alleviation and so during my Post-Doc I started thinking about education as one application of decision making under uncertainty.

Have you found a way to combine your interests?
I’ve been doing work on decision making under uncertainty for pretty much my whole Ph.D., and for the last couple years, I’ve been thinking about education applications. I’m continuing to do work on decision making under uncertainty as I did before, and I’ll probably continue to do a number of applications. Right now I’m particularly interested in education and I hope to start doing research in health care applications too.

Do you have any advice to the students pursuing Computer Science, and how to be exposed to different areas and learn about it?
I think the main thing is that a lot of people come in now with a lot of prior background. That can be intimidating to those who don’t have that background, but I think that it is still possible to get up to the speed during an undergraduate degree in CS. And another good thing about computer science is that its ideas can be used in a much broader context. People often think that computer science is only about programming, but then you realize that it can actually be applicable to medical diagnosis or international development, or all these other really exciting areas.

To be exposed to many different areas, classes are good, and talking to people in another discipline is good as well. That is how I got interested in international development and how I ended up with working on that now. And I think looking at what projects the researchers and professors are working on is also good. Moreover, I know that Carnegie Mellon has TechBridgeWorld, which is fabulous in the way that it gives students an opportunity to get involved in international development and technology, so I think there are a lot of opportunities out there. It may take a little bit of digging to figure out, but it is really worthwhile.

When I was starting college, I thought everything was a ‘straight path’: from college, graduate school, professor, and so on. And that was certainly not my path, and I did not expect to be doing what I am currently doing. When you are open to different experiences, you might find a new area to be exciting, or you might find an area that you were excited and passionate about to be boring… everything is unpredictable, and that is fine. Going though the process of changing your mind a lot in order to figure out what you really want to do can still allow you to be successful and may give you a better background.

What do you think of Pittsburgh so far? What are some of your favorites things to do in Pittsburgh?
I love Pittsburgh! I have been here only for two months, so I did not get a lot of chances to explore the city yet because I have been unpacking – I almost have pictures on the wall at home now. Pittsburgh is fairly nice, and I think it has an interesting mix of mid-west and east coast culture with really nice friendliness. And I also love east coast cities in general.

So far, I enjoy running around the river or down at a park. I have been running in Schenley park for a few times since I came here.

Then, what are some of your hobbies?
I love running. I am a long distance runner – seems like my hobby is a good parallel to my research [laughs]. I run marathons about one or two per year.

What is your favorite quote?
Hard to pick, but one is
“The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.”
~ Bertrand Russell

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