| While I did exist before college,
my life until then is of relatively little current importance. My first
7+ grades were done about half a globe away from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in
a city called Minsk (well, it's actually even more complicated, and I relegate
any further details to the "Personal"
section). The remainder of 8th grade I spent in a not-worthy-of-mention
K-to-8 Chicago public school. My High School career was somewhat more interesting,
and it is possible that I will add a section on it in the future. The rest
of the story is summarized below in reverse chronological order. |
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Amazingly enough, I have completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science from U-M Ann Arbor in 2008 under the supervision of Michael Wellman.
They were glorious six years of grad school, filled with work and fun (sometimes too much fun).
To see the papers for the projects in Computational Game Theory, Mechanism Design, Economics of Information, and some others that I have worked on, take a look at the "Publications" section. |
| This was the place of my Undergraduate
wonders as a Computer Engineering major and an Economics minor. As I managed
to take something like ten classes beyond what I needed for both a major
and a minor, I took a fairly broad spectrum of courses: Anthropology, Linguistics,
Poetry (English and Russian), Basic Corporate Finance, and some others.
Having thus acquired a solid liberal arts education, I failed to gain much
depth in anything. Fortunately, I realized this a term before leaving Northwestern,
and in a final push of my Undergraduate career finished up with an Algorithms
course, a research-based course, an ECE
(Electrical and Computer Engineering) department Honors, and some kind of
a departmental "best senior" award under my belt - essentially,
just enough to give me some confidence going into Grad School. I also managed
to fight off Senioritis for a long enough time to maintain my GPA high enough
for a summa cum laude. My explorations in multiple fields hopefully did not go to waste. At the very least, I learned how to write, and it seems to me that I've also acquired some intuition on how people act in different settings and how culture and language affect behavior. I believe this knowledge to be of great usefulness to Game Theory, which I intend to explore as a part of my research: after all, irrational, or boundedly rational behavior is a consequence of those "other" factors. No less interesting to me would be an exploration into the effects of sub-optimal behavior on outcomes (in the non-trivial scenarios, of course). Possibly, "tweaking" incentives may be of value, or, conversely, this sub-optimal behavior with respect to the agent's utility may actually benefit the system. To make it less abstract, human behavior may provide valuable insights into building electronic systems, which will most likely become my ultimate goal. Besides all this apparently irrelevant stuff, I've also done some Computer Science research. Not much of it, admittedly, as I only began considering Grad School after I entered my last year of college. But as I realized that some experience in doing CS research would really help me along down the line, the sense of urgency prevailed, and I ended up with two completely unrelated research projects during my last term at Northwestern: one had to do with Image Compression algorithms and was sponsored by Microsoft. This project became my Honors thesis. The second project was File System measurements: I was looking for file access patterns in Coda traces. Some samples of my work as an Undergraduate can be found under the "Unpublished" section. |