ThoughtFill

About Me

I was born in Moscow, Russia but crossed the atlantic ocean shortly before my fifth birthday to land in Pittsburgh, PA. I attended Taylor Allderdice Highschool where I had the great fortune to interact with some absolutely stellar (and perhaps eccentric) educators - most notably Dr. Barry Fulks, Ed Flynn, and Gina Pacitti. I then moved about a dozen blocks west to enroll at Carnegie Mellon University.

Raised by two applied mathematicians and deeply enamored of video games, I joined 130 other misguided freshman computer scientists . We were summarily informed that 'computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes,' and so I set about determining what, in fact, it is about. I'm not sure I ever really figured it out, but along the way I did learn some great theoretical ideas. Do you know about optimal cake cutting? I also picked up a degree in Human Computer Interaction through which I learned a little bit about design, and fell in love with the affinity diagram.

Taking a class called "Consciousness and Cognition" I met Dr. Ken Kotovsky who would take me under his wing, becoming my mentor and friend. Under Ken's direction I TAed Introduction to Psychology, and wrote an honor's thesis about the role of working memory in transfer of implicit knowledge. I also went sailing, learned to distrust statistical significance, and worked on a computational geometry metric for progress in the 10 Coins Puzzle. Maybe someday I'll keep my promise and publish it...

In 2007 I graduated and moved to Bloomington, IN to study with Chen Yu, whose work I had fallen in love with on my visit. Although I had every intention of studying adult learners, I have since become interested in developing systems. With Linda Smith two doors down the hall, the problem somehow seems tractable. Now I bring infants into the lab, show them them videos, and model their eye movements to discover how they learn words.

At other times, I am a climber, runner, or an angoleiro. When the weather's nice I like camping, slacklining, and wandering around the Bloomington farmers' market. When it's not, I hang out at coffee shops.

To see my acadamic genealogy, have a look at my