About me
Update 3/1/2008: I'm going to be starting graduate study at the Computer and Information Sciences Department at the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall.
I am currently a research specialist at the Computational Memory Lab at Princeton University, although I am currently applying to graduate school. I graduated from Princeton in June of 2007 with a A.B. in Computer Science and a Certificate in Neuroscience. My advisors were Dave Blei (Computer Science) and Ken Norman (Psychology), who are both extremely cool and awesome. See my CV.
I'm also a member of the teams Dinosaur Planet and When Dinosaurs and Gravity Unite in the Netflix Prize contest, an international collaborative filtering competition worth $1 million. We just barely lost the 2007 Progress Prize to AT&T Research in October. See our approach to the Netflix problem.
I'm also working for MedForward, a tech startup led by my brother Michael. We're changing the way doctors thinking about online content management. We also work on web design for physicians and medical web design.
Finally, I'm marrying my high school sweetheart Gillian Braden in May of 2008.
Research Interests
I'm interested in machine learning and statistics; I find applications of machine learning methods to neuroscience datasets particularly fascinating. Examples of these sorts of problems are:
- Using pattern recognition algorithms to ''read minds'' from functional MRI, EEG, or intracranial recordings of neural activity.
- Using probabilistic models to infer the functional connectivity between neurons based on multi-unit electrophysiological data.
- Using computer vision algorithms to reconstruct 3D models of neurons based on thousands of scanning electron microscopy images of a single volume of neural tissue.
- Anything, really, that involves applying machine learning to infer something about the brain using vast amounts of data that isn't easily processed by us humans.
I'm also interested in more traditional machine learning and statistics topics like learning theory and collaborative filtering. For more details and examples, see my Research page. If you're an undergrad at Princeton who wants to know more about what it's like combining CS and Neuroscience, please drop me an email.
Contact Information
David Weiss
Princeton Computational Memory Lab
djweiss AT princeton DOT edu
3-N-14 Green Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ