Prior to this he was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago(TTIC), a post-doctoral scholar at TTIC hosted by Karen Livescu, a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond and a research associate at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 and 2009, respectively. His research interests include machine learning, speech recognition and statistical signal processing, with emphasis on dimensionality reduction and representation learning using multi-view learning, similarity-based learning, and deep learning as well as methods from group theory, representation theory and harmonic analysis. Central to his research is the theory and application of stochastic approximation algorithms that can scale to big data.