Welcome to my profile at the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie. I successfully defended my dissertation at Dal in 2007 and began a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Health Informatics and Learning Lab at that time. I subsequently worked for two years as a game development consultant on an NSERC IRDF Post-doc, investigating the role of game math and behavior models in product development and am currently employed as a Research Associate on an NSERC Collaborative Research and Develpoment (CRD) grant toward mining and modeling of real-world gaming data at the NIMS lab.

My previous research was part of an ongoing collaboration with the department of Opthalmology and Visual Sciences (in association with Dr. Raza Abidi's NICHE Group) and focused on the role of shape-based appearance information in practical medical applications of Optic Nerve Tomography.

My PhD thesis concerned real-world applications of computer algorithms inspired in part by a neo-Darwinian metaphor for evolution, where populations of computer programs (models) adapt and improve as they experience a training environment. This class of algorithms offers a number of compelling advantages for the end-user, including: flexibility of representation, problem-specific definition of cost function and explicit user designation of credit assignment models. These algorithms have the potential to solve very complex learning and optimization problems quickly, transparently and automatically.

To be more specific, my thesis dealt with scalability, solution modularity and transparency issues under the Genetic Programming (GP) paradigm of Evolutionary Computation. My focus was on the design of a practical competitive / cooperative coevolutionary framework for the Machine Learning task known as Classification. For more, have a look at my dissertation material under the research tab.

Please feel free to look around and don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions or comments.