His research focuses on machine learning, statistics, computer vision, data mining, and large-scale optimization. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley EECS and was also affiliated with the International Computer Science Institute. He obtained his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas in 2008, and his BA degree from Cornell University in computer science and mathematics in 2003. For his research, he has won three best student paper awards at top-tier conferences---two at the International Conference on Machine Learning (in 2005 and 2007) and one at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (in 2008). He was also the recipient of an MCD graduate fellowship from the University of Texas (2003-2007) and an Award of Excellence from the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas