Hello, reader. If you’d like the short version (and a picture!) you can check out this page; otherwise prepare yourself for the cinematic masterpiece of a generation…well when the movie comes out, I’ll let you know.

For me, the question “when am I going to use this again?!” reeks of irony. If only our tired-of-math protagonist, high school Dan, knew that years later he would be spending many an hour, voluntarily - even happily - working on math, he would indeed be very confused. Pats MacBook gently That’s right, my first academic love was undoubtedly history, so much so that when it came to my undergraduate studies at Fordham University (Fordham College at Lincoln Center) there was no doubt in my mind as to a major. The same love carried me onto a Master’s degree in history via a 5-year program, where I wrote one very hefty thesis on the bizarre and fascinating trajectory of European fascism from its prewar nationalist focus to, believe-it-or-not, a post-war pan-European push. As exhausting enjoyable as this experience was, I thought it best to go out into the world and get some good work experience under my belt. After all, a job at the FBI, NSA, or another agency where I could put my analytical and research abilities to work, was going to require some solid professional background.

So I went and did just that: I became a litigation paralegal at McLaughlin & Stern, LLP, where I got to work with some wonderful and kind people, and learn a lot along the way. Interestingly, what I learned about myself, was that I was increasingly craving the satisfaction that only comes from creating something. Some hands-on work on the family home - I can still smell the paint and spackle now (maybe I should get that checked out) - was quite fun, but wasn’t going to be my career. In short order I found myself drawn more and more to the unlimited digital medium: code. Moreover, artificial intelligence and robotics just seemed so darn interesting; I mean who hasn’t seen Iron Man and gone running to the Arduino section at Micro Center to get started on their own suit. After over two years as a paralegal, I laid down my legal notepad, and started a computer science bachelor’s degree at Hunter College.

Wouldn’t you know it, years after proudly declaring to my desk that I would never touch math again, I was back. Worse, I was back to the parts that (not naming names) were covered very poorly in high school - combinations, permutations and anything that might have fallen under the discrete math umbrella. Yet I had never struggled with math before, and in fact was typically at the top of my classes; I simply had not enjoyed it. And this is where I feel the “right place, right time” mantra gains real meaning: sometimes you can be exposed to what the you of 8 years later (or earlier, or…from another dimension?) would find fascinating but you just aren’t in the right frame of mind for it yet. Thankfully the stars started to align for me: I pushed past my discrete math terrors to becoming a TA for the discrete math course and started to make all of my internal techno-babble about AI more concrete by joining a lab group and studying computer vision and robotics. In my final year for the degree, I even had the great privilege of interning at Geopipe and immersing myself in deep learning and a really fun small team environment.

Knowing that much of the AI development world is looking for higher education and that I still had much to learn, I went for Master’s Degree: Part Deux. Graduate work is always challenging, but honestly it was a blast. For starters, I got to take courses on artificial intelligence (broad survey), machine learning, reinforcement learning, simulation, parallel programming, and advanced programming languages. Better yet, I became a graduate research assistant under the incredible Dr. Anita Raja, and had the opportunity to research and prototype an unsupervised pipeline for learning Bayesian networks to tackle the very challenging task of predicting and preventing preterm birth; this work became the basis of my thesis (link to come!), which also included a hefty amount of work on discretization. Along the way, I had some great fun with a number of projects, which I’ll soon be adding a page for on this website, and I’ll keep adding to the collection as I make more!

Phew…that brings us to today, where I am currently on the hunt for work in AI engineering. The academic setting is great, but right now I want to get out into industry and get busy. Is a PhD on the horizon? Perhaps, but - and not to brag - I’m running out of wall space for these diplomas.