He was previously a 3 year Post-Doctoral Research Associate at University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduated with his PhD from Oregon State University. His research interests lie in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with emphasis on Machine Learning, Statistical Relational AI, Reinforcement Learning and Graphical Models with applications in Biomedicine and Health Informatics. He is a Senior Program Committee member of IJCAI 2013 and has served on the PC of several conferences/workshops such as AAAI, IJCAI, ICML, ECML, ILP and SRL. He has co-organized the AAAI 2010 and the UAI 2012 workshops on Statistical Relational AI (StarAI), the 2012 Workshop on SRL and the ECML PKDD 2011 and 2012 workshops on Collective Learning and Inference on Structured Data (Co-LISD). He is co-organizing the AAAI 2013 workshop on StarAI.