About Mike:
I am a graduating fourth year with a mission to explore the frontiers of what is possible with artificial minds. In Fall 2019, I created the student taught class, CS 1501: Artificial General Intelligence that was taught to almost 150 students over three semesters here at UVA. This class would not have happened without ESC's generous support, as well as Professor Rich Nguyen! I am most proud of having read one book per week for almost three years, totaling over 140 books on AI, philosophy, literature, and science in my quest to understand the mind and the brain.
After graduation, I will be moving to Cambridge, MA to start my full time position as a computational research developer in DiCarlo labs at MIT, where I will be lead software engineer for Brain-Score, a tool to measure how brain-like artificial neural networks are. This is my dream job, and I am very fortunate to have found it. After a few years in this position, my hope is to stay at MIT to do a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience in their Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, and to eventually become a professor myself.
How Mike achieved success this year:
The main thing that helped me through the year was my family - I am ridiculously lucky to have incredible parents and a selfless older sister who all provided support through times of self-doubt and uncertainty. My girlfriend and high school sweetheart, Kendall, is such a wonderful part of my life that I can't imagine having done the adventure of college without her. I have two dogs, an adopted border collie, Shadow, and a Bernese Mountain Dog, Winston, who kept my spirits up while I was struggling with debugging C pointers in Operating Systems.
My mentors at UVA proved invaluable to my personal growth as a person and as a scientist. I want to specifically thank Engineering Dean Emeritus James Aylor for his continued and unwavering support of my activities and antics, and for the scholarship he bestowed upon me. I also wanted to thank Professor Nguyen again, for reasons stated above, as well as STS Professor Travis Elliot, whose unwavering dedication to open discussion and free thought was a beacon of light. Last but not least, I wanted to thank EE Ph.D. student Nazia Tabassum, with whom I worked for over 2 years as part of the Double Hoo grant and whose incredible advice on graduate school and research in general helped me immensely.