He received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT under the supervision of of Bill Freeman, and then spent two years as a postdoc at the University of Toronto. He is a recipient of the NDSEG Graduate Fellowship, the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, and outstanding paper awards at the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML) and the Conference for Uncertainty in AI (UAI). He is also a co-creator of Metacademy, an open-source web site for developing personalized learning plans in machine learning and related fields.