My research has spanned many areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the past 20 years. A core interest in the past few years is on algorithms for learning low-dimensional representations of high-dimensional data. My recent work has focused on investigating representation discovery in a variety of settings, including decision-theoretic planning and reinforcement learning, transfer learning, natural language processing, and robotics. I am also investigating scalable online convex optimization methods, such as mirror descent, and their application to reinforcement learning and representation discovery.
I serve as the Graduate Program Director for the Department of Computer Science. Inquiries regarding the graduate program should go to Leeanne Leclerc, Graduate Program Manager, leclerc@cs.umass.edu.