Résumé - James Cook

Papers

How to Grow More Pairs: Suggesting Review Targets for Comparison-Friendly Review Ecosystems. WWW 2013 [PDF]
James Cook, Alex Fabrikant, Avinatan Hassidim.
Group Chats on Twitter. WWW 2013 [PDF]
James Cook, Nina Mishra, Krishnaram Kenthapadi.
Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother's. WWW 2012 [arXiv, slides (pdf)]
James Cook, Atish Das-Sarma, Alex Fabrikant, Andrew Tomkins.
(New Scientist article.)
Goldreich's One-Way Function Candidate and Myopic Backtracking Algorithms. TCC 2009 [2012 update (ECCC), 2009 pdf]
James Cook, Omid Etesami, Rachel Miller, Luca Trevisan.
Visualizing Similarity Data with a Mixture of Maps. AISTATS 2007 [pdf]
James Cook, Ilya Sutskever, Andriy Mnih, Geoffrey Hinton.

UC Berkeley

I am a Ph.D. student in computer science under Satish Rao.
University of Toronto

Honours Bachelor of Science, specializing in Computer Science and Mathematics, completed May 2007. (Lots of advanced math and computer science theory.)

Summer 2012: Research intern, working with Alex Fabrikant, Avinatan Hassidim and Mohammad Mahdian. Worked on algorithms for suggesting places for people to review, with an unusual goal: to maximize the odds that, when a future user wants to compare a pair of venues, there will exist a reviewer who has reviewed both. (Paper submitted.)
Summer 2011: Research intern, working with Atish Das-Sarma, Alex Fabrikant and Andrew Tomkins. Studied how durations of personal fame in the news have changed over the past several decades, by performing large-scale data analysis of Google's news archive. Work presented at WWW 2012.
Summer 2007: Software engineering intern, hosted by Christopher Taylor. I worked on a large software project in C++, and wrote my own piece of software in JavaScript.

Summer 2012: Research intern, working with Nina Mishra and Krishnaram Kenthapadi on algorithms for finding social groups. (Paper submitted.)

Fall 2011: Teaching assistant for CS 70, "Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory", taught by Satish Rao.
Fall 2010: Teaching assistant for CS 170, "Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems", taught by Christos Papadimitriou.

NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship award for 2007-2012.
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest 2009: my team advanced to the world finals in Stockholm.
NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards in 2005 and 2006.

Love Trampoline, a game I made with Jimmy Andrews for the A Game by Its Cover contest in 2010.
I wrote a metropolis light transport raytracer in Haskell for fun.
A demonstration of three-dimensional elliptic (non-Euclidean) geometry.

I learn programming languages quickly; I have worked with C++, JavaScript, Python, Java and Matlab, and in my spare time I have explored dozens of other languages, from Haskell to Perl to Maude. I've written a bunch of mapreductions for research.
I have taken an interest in a variety of other things, including the Plan 9 operating system from Bell Labs and the Coq proof assistant.
I am familiar with UNIX programming, and have experience using Linux and FreeBSD.

I learned French for seven years in elementary school, and Mandarin for two years at UC Berkeley.
Ballet student with the School of Atelier Ballet for ten years.
Performed with Opera Atelier (as a student) in their Dance Through Time productions.
Took lead roles in Opera Atelier's summer youth opera program.
Played the viola for two years with Hart House strings at the University of Toronto

E-Mail: jcook@eecs.berkeley.edu; Phone: 510-221-7496; Website: http://www.falsifian.org/
References available upon request.

I am a dual citizen of Canada and the United states.