Formal Bio

You can find my formal bio here. Here is a picture of me that can be used for announcements.

Overview

I am the Finmeccanica associate professor in the Machine Learning Department and in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. I co-direct the Sense, Learn, and Act (Select) Lab with Geoff Gordon. In 2003-2004, I spent a year as a senior researcher at the Intel Research Lab in Berkeley. In August 2003, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. I received a Mechatronics Engineer (Mechanical Engineering, with emphasis in Automation and Systems) degree in 1998 from the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Honors and Awards

• 2012 IJCAII-JAIR Best Paper runner-up prize in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) for Optimal Value of Information in Graphical Models with Andreas Krause. This prize is awarded to an outstanding paper and a runner-up published in JAIR in the preceding five calendar years.
• Best Paper Award in the Sixteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2010) for Connecting the Dots Between News Articles with Dafna Shahaf.
• Best Student Paper Award in International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2010) for Focused Belief Propagation for Query-Specific Inference with Anton Chechetka.
• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2009.
• IJCAI 2009 Computers and Thought Award. See the slides and video of the talk.
• Best Research Paper Award from the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management Engineering for Efficient Sensor Placement Optimization for Securing Large Water Distribution Networks with Andreas Krause, Jure Leskovec, Jeanne VanBriesen, and Christos Faloutsos.
• Member of the DARPA Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) advisory group.
• Finmeccanica Chair in Computer Science.
• 2008 "Brilliant 10" by Popular Science Magazine.
• ONR Young Investigator Award, (2008).
• Honorable Mention for Outstanding Paper Award in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2007) for Efficient Inference for Distributions on Permutations with Jon Huang and Leo Guibas.
• Best Paper Award in the Thirteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2007) for Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks with Jure Leskovec, Andreas Krause, Christos Faloutsos, Jeanne VanBriesen and Natalie Glance.
• IBM Faculty Fellowship, (2007).
• 2007 IJCAII-JAIR Best Paper prize in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) for Efficient Solution Algorithms for Factored MDPs with Daphne Koller, Ron Parr and Shobha Venkataraman. This prize is awarded to an outstanding paper published in JAIR in the preceding five calendar years.
• NSF CAREER Award, (2007).
• IBM Faculty Fellowship, (2006).
• Best Paper Award in the Fifth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'06) for Near-optimal Sensor Placements: Maximizing Information while Minimizing Communication Cost with Andreas Krause, Anupam Gupta and Jon Kleinberg.
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2006).
• Best Paper Runner-Up Award in the 22^nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2005) for Near-Optimal Sensor Placements in Gaussian Processes with Andreas Krause and Ajit Singh.
• Best Paper Runner-Up Award in 21^st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2005) for Near-Optimal Nonmyopic Value of Information in Graphical Models with Andreas Krause.
• Best Paper Award in the Fourth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'05) for A Robust Architecture for Distributed Inference in Sensor Networks with Mark Paskin and Jim McFadden.
• Best Paper Award in the 30^th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2004) for Model-Driven Data Acquisition in Sensor Networks with Amol Deshpande, Sam Madden, Joseph Hellerstein and Wei Hong.
• Best Paper Award in the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2003) for Max-Margin Markov Networks with Ben Taskar and Daphne Koller.
• Siebel Scholarship, 2009
• Stanford Centennial Teaching Assistant Award, 2000.