As a practitioner, my research interests are varied but centered across how users or agents interact with devices and other items in their landscape. The obvious mathematical framework is reinforcement learning with policies, and more importantly, the vital importance of exploration, inherent variability of internet traffic (or human behavior) in the framework of information theory and risk management, which extends readily to Statistical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics and Thermodynamics. I am very interested in applying those elements to model the intent of customers and users in a highly networked environments, both retail and virtual or online.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I am interested in casting any time-varying process or train of events as a dynamical system and then determining whether it can be controlled in the sense of mathematics (e.g. almost surely) but more importantly in a practical setup and to what precision. I also value the process of rigorous thought before casting a system as a model, to consider how complex it really could be and whether that complexity is truly a signature of the system or of exogenous factors. This is almost an epistemological question: what exactly is a degree of freedom? What is a model? a graph (directed or undirected), a mathematical equation, a matrix, an expectation? In that sense, my approch is closer to that of Renaissance scientists (minus the religious fervor) and Newtonian, as one of tinkering, taking limits, simplifying and looking for generalization and unification.

You might also want to visit the publications page for better context.

I obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (Advisor Duane D. Bruns) in August 2003, and a M.S. in Statistics in December 2003 --both at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). My research focused on nonlinear and chaotic systems and on the techniques to extract information and patterns from them, and especially in trying to merge statistical techniques with the engineering paradigms. My dissertation was titled Detecting changes in global dynamics with principal curves and information theory.

I received my B.S. in Chemical Engineering in May 1996 from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur with minors in Environmental Science and Psychology. A brief summary of the research work I have been involved with can be browsed through the inverted tab menu below the masthead (near the top).