biography

Thanks for visiting my web site! At the beginning of July, 2020, after three wonderful years as the Founding Dean of the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, I stepped down and will focus on research and the Institute for Modeling and Managing Complicated Systems (momacs). From 2013 to 2017 I was a program manager in DARPA's Information Innovation Office, where I designed and managed the Big Mechanism and Communicating with Computers and World Modelers programs. I was on loan to DARPA from the University of Arizona, where I served as head of Computer Science and founded the School of Information: Science, Technology and Arts (SISTA, now part of SI). My research is in aspects of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. I am interested in language, communication, and AI methods to help us understand very complicated systems such as cell signaling pathways and food/water/energy interactions.