Research

• The Nature of Service.  What is the nature of service?  How can we evaluate and measure good and bad service?  How can we build computational systems that provide good service?  How can we be better helpers and servants to each other?  In what ways does being a servant involve establishing relationship and trust?  This involves issues of user modeling, goal inference, adaptive interfaces, evaluation of user aids.
• Bioinformatics.  In general, I am interested in applying data mining techniques to problems in Biology.  One particularly challenging problem with tremendous potential benefit is the development of an intuitive interface for biologists to mine the data they collect without assistance from computer scientists.
  
• Computer Ethics and the Internet. an exploration into behavior-guiding principles in the internet or other virtual environments, particularly slanted toward the notion of ownership and property.
• Philosopher's Workbench. Can we build a suite of tools that help us explore various questions of traditional and computational Philosophy?  What would such a suite include and which questions would be appropriate targets for exploration?  Could we gain insights into epistemology or free will through simulated environments and artificial agents?
  
• Average-case analyses of machine learning algorithms. requires a strong combinatorics/counting methods and general math skills, as well as a general interest in machine learning
• Westmont Cluster Project.  Learn to use a Beowulf-class cluster computer.  Develop systems that exploit the benefits of parallel computation.  Serve other researchers in helping port their computational work onto our cluster.
  

Selected publications, reports, and papers