Machine learning methods and inventory management were a focus in my Master’s work. In the newsvendor problem, an amount of product to order must be decided upon periodically for reselling. Ordering too much results in losses due to overstock which must be discarded; too little results in losses due to lost sales. Traditional approaches experience a tradeoff in that some methods perform better in some situations, while our machine learning approach performs well consistently, particularly in situations where the demand suddenly increases or decreases.

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This was a project I did for Cryptography, which implemented a digital cash scheme as a web service. The idea behind digital cash is that, well, it’s digital cash. Which means, it’s a digital object which has value and can be traded/spent, but is also anonymous. This is accomplished via digital signatures. Alice, who has money in the bank, sends the bank an string of random letters and an amount to withdraw.

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I did this project with Allison Regier. It’s not too difficult to write a program which uses an exhaustive search to play a game. What this requires, though, is some way to evaluate one board against another to tell which moves to make. Usually such a comparison function is hand written. We asked whether it was possible to write a generic board evaluation function which would learn a preference over board states by playing many games, either against itself or a hand coded evaluation function.

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I also studied formal logic, under the direction of the amazing Don Faust. I still recommend the book What Is Mathematical Logic for a good (but dense) overview of the topic. These are just some proofs I worked out. Proof of deduction theorem Proof of a lemma used in proof of Completeness: Soundness implies Completeness

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Some code from a very cool computer graphics class, mostly in Java.

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Just a few things from my undergrad algs class.

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I really enjoyed the survey of programming topics and paradigms this class offered.

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I took a Theory of Knowledge class as an undergraduate, and thoroughly enjoyed it. To this day I’m surprised how much epistemology is to be found at the intersection of science and engineering. Three Principles of Cartesian Epistemology Gettier’s Second Counterexample The Nature of Sense Data Unger’s Defense of Scepticism Goldman’s Causal Chains Dretske’s Epistemic Operators Quine’s Naturalization and Kim’s Response

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