His work focuses on principled data mining algorithm development in particular encoding knowledge into algorithms. With collaborators he has applied his work to a number of different domains including social network analysis in Afghanistan (with MITRE), war game simulations (with U.S. Army) and fMRI analysis (Alzheimer's institute at U.C. Davis). He received his Ph.D. in 2000 from Monash University in Australia. He has been the recipient of best paper awards at the SIAM and IEEE data mining awards and is on the editorial board of most data mining journals. His research is supported by ONR, NSF, OSD, Google and IBM awards.