He is an NSF CAREER award recipient, a member of MIT Technology Review's 'Top 35 Innovators under the Age of 35', and a Microsoft Faculty Fellow. He received his Bachelors degree in Computer Science from McMaster University, Canada; his Masters degree in Evolutionary and Adpative Systems from the University of Sussex, UK; and his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He also served as a postdoctoral associate in the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University.