Résumé - James Cook

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

Education: UC Berkeley

I have been a Ph.D. student in computer science (theory) since September 2007.

Education: University of Toronto

Honours Bachelor of Science, specializing in Computer Science and Mathematics, completed May 2007. CGPA 3.86 out of 4.

Research Experience

• Summer 2006:

  Research assistant with Professor Geoffrey Hinton in Machine Learning, under an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA).

• Summer 2005:

  Research assistant with Professor Hinton under an NSERC USRA.

Conference Paper (AISTATS 2007)

James Cook, Ilya Sutskever, Andriy Mnih and Geoffrey Hinton, "Visualising Similarity Data with a Mixture of Maps". Abstract:

We show how to visualize a set of pairwise similarities between objects by using several different two-dimensional maps, each of which captures different aspects of the similarity structure. When the objects are ambiguous words, for example, different senses of a word occur in different maps, so ``river'' and ``loan'' can both be close to ``bank'' without being at all close to each other. Aspect maps resemble clustering because they model pair-wise similarities as a mixture of different types of similarity, but they also resemble local multi-dimensional scaling because they model each type of similarity by a two-dimensional map. We demonstrate our method on a toy example, a database of human word-association data, a large set of images of handwritten digits, and a set of feature vectors that represent words.

Work Experience

Summer 2007: Software Engineering Intern at Google. I worked on a large software project in C++, and wrote my own piece of software in JavaScript.

Technical Skills

• I learn programming languages quickly; I have worked with C++, JavaScript, Python, Scheme, ML, Java and Matlab, and in my spare time I have explored dozens of other languages, from Haskell to Perl to Maude.
• 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 Linux/UNIX programming, and use FreeBSD for every-day computing.

Dance, Music, Drama

• 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

Contact Information

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