Aaron Arvey

About Me

Aaron Arvey is currently an undergraduate student at Claremont McKenna College. He is completing majors in Computer Science (at Harvey Mudd College) and Mathematics (at McKenna). His research interests include probabilistic inference in machine learning, bioinformatics, and neural processing sytems. He is a senior fellow of the Reed Institute for Decision Science, Myhre scholar, consultant for the U.S. Navy and Lockheed Martin at MARC Consulting Group, and research assistant at Keck Graduate Institute in computational biology.

Refereed Conference Papers

Online Markov Decision Processes for Learning Movement in Games. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Systems. July 2005. Paper and videos

Refereed Journal Papers

(In Preparation) Higher Order Jensen-Shannon Segmentation of Symbolic Sequences. Physical Review E.

Refereed Abstracts

Asymptotically Periodic Solutions of Linear ODE's Joint MAA and AMS Meeting Undergraduate Research Poster Session. Phoenix, Arizona. January 2004. Abstract, poster, and presentation (Outstanding Poster Award)

Empirical Bayesian Data Adjustment and Subpopulations Southern California Meeting of the American Statistics Association. November 2005. presentation (Best Undergraduate Poster)

Markovian Change Point Analysis to Detect Coding Regions of DNA Joint MAA and AMS Meeting Undergraduate Research Poster Session. San Antonio, Texas. January 2006. presentation (Outstanding Poster Award)

Technical Reports

These are fairly lengthy reports, some of which have proprietary information. Thus some are unfortunately not available on my site. However, feel free to contact me for more information and I will tell you what I can.

Hierarchical Dynamic Bayesian Networks and Level 3 Fusion. Submitted to Toyon Research Corporation. September 2005.

DFR Lower Confidence Bounds and LE Subpopulations. Submitted to Lockheed Martin and the Navy. November 2005.

Differential Code Coverage in the Context of the Wine Project. Submitted to Google. May 2005. Full version (56 pages) (pdf) Article (8 pages) (pdf)

Resume and Transcripts

My resume can be found in PDF and MS Word formats.

My unofficial transcripts from Claremont McKenna College can be found in PDF and PS formats. My unofficial transcripts from North Seattle Community College can be found in PDF and PS formats.

Presentations

I have given several presentations on topics such as

• Intrusion Detection Systems
• Clustering Methodologies
• Information Theory
• Differential Equations
• Reliability Theory
• Machine Learning
• Markov Decision Processes

I'll add links to the actual presentations soon!

Course Work

I have taken classes in computer science and math. While my main interest is in Machine Learning, I have never taken any formal course in the subject matter.

Research Assistantships

Reed Institute for Decision Science sponsored research in the field of statistical analysis of reliability data using multiple measures such as fault trees, approximation methods using Bayesian data adjustment, and classical frequentist methods.

Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) funded work for Monte Carlo simulation of biological symbolic data for recursive segmentation algorithms as applied to the problem of detecting coding vs. non-coding regions.

Teaching Experience

In the 2005 spring semester, I assisted Professor Belinda Thom teach a upper division course in machine learning. I designed and wrote (along with keys) several homework and lab assignments. Seeing as how I was a junior and all the students in the course were seniors, I asked to not grade any of the assignments

I graded for a discrete math course taught by Professor Greg Stein at Claremont McKenna College where my only responsibility was to correct assignments and tutor students.

While at community college, I used my student government office (surprisingly large) to teach a group of Spanish speaking students the basic computer skills necessary to succeed in a college environment. At the time I spoke Spanish fluently. Skills taught included basic operations in MS Windows, MS Office, and internet communication.

Professional Activities

I am a member of the mathematical societies AMS and MAA. I am a member of AUAI (Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence). I'm soon to be a member of the ACM and IEEE.

Why am I a member? Well, for the AMS and MAA, I received free membership due to my research in areas of interest to these groups. My main research is in uncertainty reasoning, and the mailing lists for AUAI also provide insight into conferences that I would be otherwise unaware of. I'm going to join IEEE because there are several articles I would like to read which are only accessible to members. The ACM special interest groups are an excellent resource to gain insight in to what other people in similar research areas are currently persuing. While I was putting together an article for Google, I wanted to find all I could on software engineering and the ACM special interest group provided me all the resources I could ask for... even better then "googling" for software engineering!

Fellowships and Awards

• I am a fellow of The Reed Institute and a winner of the Myhre Scholarship which covers nearly all tuition and living costs.
• I received a outstanding poster award at the Joint MAA/AMA math conference in Phoenix, January, 2004. This award was given to the top 20% of posters as judged by a committee of over 100 referees. Each poster was reviewed by 3 referees. No higher prize was awarded during the poster session.
• I received the award for best undergraduate poster at the Southern California Meeting of the American Statistical Association.

Collaborators

Some of the people I've worked with include:

• Eric Aaron and I worked together while he taught at Pomona College. I presented a paper we wrote at CGAIMS 2005. He has since received a position at Wesleyan University. We are currently working on extending the CGAIMS 2005 work to be significantly more autonomous through a reinforcement learning framework.
• Belinda Thom and I worked on creating a course on machine learning at Harvey Mudd College. The course website and wiki contains a lot of good information and some pretty cool assignments (I think they're cool cause I wrote three out of four :-)).
• Janet Myhre and I worked on projects for Lockheed Martin and the Navy regarding system reliability. This involved shockingly complex theories.
• Mario Martelli, David Nichols and I worked on periodic differential equations; however, our results could not be generalized to n-dimensions (a counter-example was discovered when n is infinite).
• Alpan Raval, Rajeev Azad (Georgia Tech Researcher), and I have been working on symbol sequence Monte Carlo biological simulations. We intend to extend work done by Dr. Azad a few years ago on the topic of discovering coding regions in DNA.
• Elizabeth "Z" Sweedyk Software testing
• Dan Kegel Software testing at Google
• Asuman Aksoy
writing a undergraduate analysis question and answer book.
• Who am I forgetting...
lots of people.

Links

Here are some links to other parts of the site.

• My Current Research Site
• Survey of the Literature
• Some (Bash) Shell One-Liners
• My AUAI Wiki Site
• Neurobiology Illusion Links

Here are some links which I use on a daily basis and don't want to have to deal with bookmarks.