ESP Biography

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I grew up in San Diego a couple blocks from the beach until 4th grade, where I moved to north county and went to high school at Fallbrook Union High School. I started programming computer games in 2nd grade in BASIC on an Atari 800. I started playing soccer around the same time. My parents design and remodel "fixer" houses for a living, so every couple of years I would move to a new school with new friends! I loved it; my brother hated it. We're still tight like that. I started playing bass guitar and singing in bands in 7th grade. I started programming neural networks and sweating to get them to learn the simplest things in my sophomore year of high school.

I got into MIT and left home for the other coast. I started rowing for the crew team (division one!) rather than playing soccer for MIT. I finally nabbed a degree in computer science after five years, but I also managed to fit in some neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy classes. I started working in the Media Lab on artificial intelligence research my freshman year of college. I must say that graduate studies at MIT have been so much more relaxing and fun than my undergraduate time, which was very hard-kore! Now I am trying to pull together a team of undergraduate hackers to construct a super-computer that has human-scale artificial intelligence with commonsense knowledge and new super-advanced robot control algorithms. That's my story, anyway. :-)

Past Classes