daniel roy // droy

research

I am focusing in on the intersection of computer science and probability, using stochastic programming languages to develop a computational perspective on fundamental ideas in probability theory.

teaching

S2008 - 6.437 Inference and Information
with Polina Golland and Greg Wornell

F2007 - 6.867 Machine Learning
with Tommi Jaakkola

F2003 - 6.035 Computer Language Engineering
with Martin Rinard and Saman Amarasinghe

personal

Hello, my name is Dan(iel) and I am a graduate student in the EECS PhD program in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). I collaborate with my advisor Leslie Kaelbling as well as members of Josh Tenenbaum's Computational Cognitive Science group on work at the intersection of cognitive science and machine learning. My other interests include scalable AI, algorithmic complexity, logical representations, grounding, coding and information theory, automated software synthesis, and programming language theory. Outside of academia, I enjoy making films, producing electronic music, playing volleyball, squash, tennis and basketball, skimboarding, reading non-fiction, skiing, biking around on my single speed, dancing salsa, studying cello and traveling.

am i hot?

You may have heard of website I started called AmIHot.com. After it was featured on Howard Stern's radio show in 2000, its popularity sky-rocketed. I took spring term of my sophomore year at MIT off to work on AmIHot.com full time and make it profitable. Before I sold AmIHot in 2004 (now HotOrNot.com), our web servers were serving up millions of page views, handled by 50,000 lines of code running on multiple database and web servers.

volleyball

I played "opposite" on the MIT Men's Varsity Volleyball Team. I was captain of the Cambridge University Men's Volleyball team during my year abroad at Cambridge during the 2001-2002 season, the best season in its history. We won both the English Volleyball Association (EVA) championship and the British Universities Sports Association (BUSA) championionship, a feat not achieved by any British university in the previous decade. The EUSA win was Cambridge University's third ever (and first for volleyball). We went on to represent the United Kingdom in the European Volleyball Championships in Athens, Greece, and came in 7th in Europe. I personally set the season record for most points in a season (kills, aces and blocks). In honor of our hard work, the entire starting team was awarded "Full Blues," a distinction reserved for Cambridge's top athletes.

Source: Jesus College Virtual Tour

study abroad

I spent my junior year abroad under the Cambridge-MIT Exchange program. CMI/CME is a great program and I highly recommend it. If you are interested in participating, I am more than willing to discuss my experience.

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publications

Hierarchical Poisson Processes, Daniel M. Roy and Yee Whye Teh. To appear at the Nonparametric Bayesian Workshop at ICML.

A stochastic programming perspective on nonparametric Bayes, Daniel M. Roy, Vikash Mansinghka, Noah Goodman, and Joshua Tenenbaum. Proceedings of the Nonparametric Bayesian Workshop at ICML.

Church: a language for generative models, Noah Goodman, Vikash Mansinghka, Daniel M. Roy, Keith Bonawitz, and Joshua Tenenbaum. To appear in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. [ PDF, bibtex ]

Bayesian Agglomerative Clustering with Coalescents, Yee Whye Teh, Hal Daumé III, and Daniel M. Roy. In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 20. Whistler, B.C. December, 2007. [ PDF, bibtex ]

Discovering Syntactic Hierarchies, Virginia Savova, Daniel M. Roy, Lauren Schmidt, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. In Cognitive Science 2007. [ PDF, bibtex ]

AClass: An online algorithm for generative classification, Vikash K. Mansinghka, Daniel M. Roy, Ryan Rifkin, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2007. San Juan, Puerto Rico. [ Abstract, PDF, bibtex ]

Efficient Bayesian Task-level Transfer Learning, Daniel M. Roy and Leslie P. Kaelbling. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligience (IJCAI). Hyderabad, India. January, 2007. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

Learning Annotated Hierarchies from Relational Data, Daniel M. Roy, Charles Kemp, Vikash Mansinghka, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 19. Whistler, B.C. December, 2006. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

Clustered Naive Bayes, Daniel M. Roy. MEng thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing, Martin Rinard, Cristian Cadar, Daniel Dumitran, Daniel M. Roy, Tudor Leu and William S. Beebee, Jr.. In Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. San Francisco, CA. December, 2004. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

A Dynamic Technique for Eliminating Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities (and Other Memory Errors), Martin Rinard, Cristian Cadar, Daniel Dumitran, Daniel M. Roy and Tudor Leu. In Proceedings of the 2004 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. Tucson, AZ. December, 2004. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

Efficient Specification-Assisted Error Localization, Brian Demsky, Cristian Cadar, Daniel M. Roy and Martin C. Rinard. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis. Edinburgh, Scotland. May, 2004. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

Efficient Specification-Assisted Error Localization and Correction, Brian Demsky, Cristian Cadar, Daniel M. Roy and Martin C. Rinard. MIT CSAIL Technical Report 927. November, 2003. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

Implementation of Constraint Systems for Useless Variable Elimination, Daniel M. Roy and Mitchell Wand. Research Science Institute. August, 1998. [ PDF, PS, bibtex ]

Professional Activities

NIPS 2008 Reviewer, ICML 2008 Program Committee, NESCAI Reviewer 2007, JMLR Reviewer 2006/07/08

view my curriculum vitae

colleagues

Leslie P. Kaelbling, research advisor.

Martin C. Rinard, former advisor.

Daniela Rus, academic advisor.

Rahul Sarpeshkar, former academic advisor.

(coauthors) William Beebee, Keith Bonawitz, Cristian Cadar, Hal Daumé III, Brian Demsky, Daniel Dumitran, Noah Goodman, Leslie Kaelbling, Charles Kemp, Tudor Leu, Vikash Mansinghka, Ryan Rifkin, Martin Rinard, Virginia Savova, Lauren Schmidt, Yee Whye Teh, Josh Tenenbaum

academics

Doctoral Student
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

spring '08 enrollment

6.437	Inference and Information (TA)
6.THG	PhD Thesis

past enrollment

5.111	Principles of Chemical Science
6.001	Structure of Computer Programs
6.002	Circuits and Electronics
6.003	Signals and Systems
6.004	Computational Structures
6.034	Artificial Intelligence
6.035	Compilers (espresso)
6.041	Probablistic Systems Analysis
6.042	Mathematics for Computer Science
6.046	Algorithms
6.050J	Information and Entropy
6.111	Digital Electronics
6.170	Lab in Software Engineering
6.253	Convex Analysis and Optimization
6.270	Autonomous Robot Competition
6.821	Programming Languages
6.825	Techniques of Artificial Intelligence
6.836	Embodied Intelligence
6.854	Advanced Algorithms
6.867	Machine Learning (TA)
6.868	Society of Mind
6.905	6.111 (extra units)
6.907	Compilers (extra units)
6.981	T.A. for 6.035
6.986	Inference and Information
7.012	Biology
8.01	Physics I - Mechanics
8.022	Physics II - E and M
9.66	Computational Cognitive Science
10.001	Intro to Computer Methods
17.01	Justice
18.01	Single-variable Calculus
18.022	Multi-variable Calculus
18.03	Differential Equations
18.100B	Analysis
18.125	Measure and Integration (OCW)
18.404	Theory of Computation
18.701	Algebra I
21L.009	Shakespeare
21M.301	Harmony and Counterpoint I
21M.302	Harmony and Counterpoint II
21M.361	Composing with Computers
21M.421	MIT Symphony (Stellar)
21M.775	Hip Hop
21W.785	Communication in Cyberspace
CMI.6.E1	Electronic Circuits ^
CMI.6.E2	Power Electronics ^
CMI.6.E3	Device Physics ^
CMI.6.E4	Feedback and Control ^
CMI.6.E5	Modulation, Networks and Optics ^
STS.035	History of Computing

* Requires MIT Security Certificate
^ Taken at Cambridge University, UK