I am a senior researcher at NEC Labs in Heidelberg. From 2012-2015 I was a research associate at the University of Washington, Seattle. From 2009-2012 I was also a member of the Data and Web Science Research Group at the University of Mannheim.

My co-authors and I were fortunate enough to win awards at international conferences such as UAI, IJCNLP, and ESWC. I was the principle investigator of a Google faculty research award and a bilateral DFG-NEH research award. My research interests include tractable machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, statistical relational learning, digital libraries and, more broadly, the large-scale extraction, integration, and analysis of structured data.

I am also co-founder of several open-source digital humanities projects such as the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project and the Linked Humanities Project.

News

• (08/25/16) The paper "Discriminative Gaifman Models" has been accepted at the Thirtieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
• (04/25/16) The paper Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for Graphs has been accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
• (03/27/16) I am co-organizing the IJCAI-16 workshop Statistical Relational AI. Please visit the workshop's website for more information (including some exciting invited talks) and consider submitting your work!
• (06/01/15) The paper "Learning and Inference in Tractable Probabilistic Knowledge Bases" was accepted at the 31st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. (UAI)
• (01/04/15) Nominated by the University of Washington, I will present my work at the Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA) in San Diego
• (11/13/14) The paper "Out of Many, One: Unifying Web-Extracted Knowledge Bases" was accepted at the NIPS Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC) 2014
• (11/08/14) The paper "Lifted Probabilistic Inference for Asymmetric Graphical Models" was accepted at the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• (11/06/14) The paper "Generalized Conditional Independence and Decomposition Cognizant Curvature: Implications for Function Optimization" was accepted at the NIPS Workshop on Discrete and Combinatorial Problems in Machine Learning
• (05/07/14) I was selected to participate in the 2nd Heidelberg Laureate Forum, to be held September 21-26 in Heidelberg, Germany
• (05/02/14) The paper "Tractability through Exchangeability: A New Perspective on Efficient Probabilistic Inference" is one of 5 papers (out of 1400 submissions) nominated for the AAAI outstanding paper award.
• (04/11/14) The paper "Exchangeable Variable Models" was accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
• (04/07/14) The paper "Tractability through Exchangeability: A New Perspective on Efficient Probabilistic Inference" was accepted at this year's AAAI conference
• (02/04/14) I am serving on the PC of the AAAI workshop StarAI and the SIGMOD/PODS workshop BUDA.
• (02/15/14) Pedro Domingos, Daniel Lowd, and I are organizing the ICML workshop Learning Tractable Probabilistic Models. Please visit the workshop's website for more information (including some exciting invited talks) and consider submitting your work!
• (02/04/14) I will serve on the PC of AAAI, ECAI, and UAI 2014.