He received the Bachelor's degree (summa cum laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego, and the Master's and Ph.D. in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include probabilistic graphical models; nonparametric Bayesian methods; and applications of statistical machine learning in computer vision, signal processing, and artificial intelligence. He was awarded a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (1999), an Intel Foundation Doctoral Fellowship (2004), and in 2008 was named one of "AI's 10 to Watch" by IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine.