He got his Ph.D. at University of California, Irvine in 2009 and then did a two-year post-doc at University of Washington. His research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining. His ongoing focus is on probabilistic graphical models, their first-order logic based extensions such as Markov logic and probabilistic programming. He has published over 25 papers in top-tier conferences and journals such as AAAI, UAI, NIPS, AISTATS, AIJ and JAIR. He is the co-winner of the last two probabilistic inference competitions - the 2010 UAI approximate inference challenge and the 2012 PASCAL probabilistic inference competition.