People

Benjamin Marlin
Assistant Professor

Professor Marlin's research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics. Professor Marlin's current research explores the development of novel machine learning models and algorithms in a number of application areas including health and behavioural science. He is particularly interested in hierarchical, probabilistic graphical models and approximate inference and learning techniques including Markov Chain Monte Carlo and variational Bayesian methods.

Brendan O'Connor
Assistant Professor

Prof. O'Connor develops natural language processing and machine learning methods to analyze social questions in text corpora, such as news or social media. For example: analyzing Twitter to understand how new slang spreads between cities, and how textual sentiment corresponds to public opinion polls. Other applications have looked at censorship in Chinese microblogs and extracting events in international relations from the news.

Daniel Sheldon
Assistant Professor

The primary goal of Professor Sheldon’s research is to develop algorithms to understand and make decisions about the environment using large data sets. He seeks to answer foundational questions (what are the general models and principles that underlie big data problems in ecology?) and also to build applications that transform large-scale data resources into scientific knowledge and policy.

Hanna Wallach
Adjunct Associate Professor

Hanna Wallach is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a member of UMass’s Computational Social Science Institute. Hanna develops machine learning methods for analyzing the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes.

Roy Adams
PhD Student

Roy is a PhD candidate working with Prof. Ben Marlin. He is interested in the application of machine learning (specifically, probabilistic graphical models) to the fields of medicine and ecology and the novel techniques that can come out of such applications. Before joining UMass, he received his BS in Computer Science Engineering from University of California - Davis.

Garrett Bernstein
PhD Student

Garrett is a PhD student advised by Prof. Dan Sheldon. His research focuses on developing machine learning algorithms to analyze large environmental datasets. Prior to UMass, he received a B.S. in Applied Physics and an MEng in Computer Science from Cornell University, and worked for three years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Su Lin Blodgett
MS/PhD student

Su Lin is a PhD student working with Professor Brendan O’Connor. She is interested in machine learning and natural processing, especially the use of statistical text analysis to answer social science questions. She received a B.A. in mathematics from Wellesley College.

Jeffrey Geevarghese
Alumni (Amazon)

Jeffrey is a graduate research assistant with Prof. Sheldon in the Machine Learning for Data Science Laboratory, working on the BirdCast Project. He completed a B.Tech Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from National Institute of Technology (NIT), Calicut, India in 2011. Previously, he worked at Oracle India and interned at Microsoft India and at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Jingyi Guo
Alumini (Amazon)

Jingyi's research interests are in the broad areas of Data Mining, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. She received her B.Eng degree from the Department of Computer Science in Tsinghua University.

Abram Handler
PhD Student

Abram Handler studies natural language processing and machine learning with Prof. Brendan O'Connor. He is interested in using techniques from data science and human computer interaction to answer questions about society and politics. Before coming to U. Mass, he worked as a software developer with the Louisiana Office of Public Health and as a data journalist with The Lens, a nonprofit news website covering New Orleans. He earned a BA in philosophy from Columbia University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of New Orleans.

Steve Cheng-Xian Li
PhD Student

Steve is a PhD student in the School of Computer science working with Professor Ben Marlin. He is interested in machine learning and its applications. Prior to joining UMass, he received a B.S. in Computer Science and Information Engineering from the National Taiwan University and an M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.

Juston Moore
Alumni (LANL)

Juston is a Masters student in the UMass Department of School Science working with Professor Hanna Wallach. He is interested in quantifying and predicting the spatial and temporal dynamics of information exchange in networks, with applications including anomaly and changepoint detection. Juston's prior work was in cyber security, with an emphasis on vulnerability detection and mitigation in corporate networks. He received his BS degree from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 2010.

Annamalai Natarajan
PhD Candidate

I am a PhD candidate at the School of Computer Science. I am broadly interested in probabilistic models, inference in these frameworks and their applications. Prior to coming to UMass, I worked as a research assistant for Ken Norman at the Princeton Computational Memory lab. At Princeton we studied the effects of memory retrieval in humans. Even before that I got my Masters from Colorado State University working with Chuck Anderson on Brain Computer Interface applications.

Aaron Schein
MS student

Aaron is an MS student in the School of Computer Science working with Professor Hanna Wallach. He is interested in developing methods to detect and analyze framing and narrative in political texts. He received a B.A. in Political Science and Linguistics and an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also works for the MITRE Corporation as a computational linguist (2011-present).

Tao Sun
PhD Candidate

Tao is a PhD student in the Schoolof Computer science working with Professor Dan Sheldon. He is interested in machine learning and its applications, and is now involved in the project BirdCast to develop novel methods for continent-scale bird migration prediction. Prior to joining UMass, he studied in Oregon State University for two years, and received a M.E. in Electronics Engineering and Communications from the Tsinghua University.

Kevin Winner
PhD Candidate

Kevin is a Ph.D. candidate working with Prof. Sheldon on machine learning for problems in population ecology and animal movement.