About Me

At MIT, I started out in theoretical mathematics and ended up in applied mathematics. At Brown, I was interested in such topics as fluid mechanics, elasticity theory, and control theory. At Yale, I rediscovered my theoretical mathematical roots, taking an algebra course under Dr. Nathan Jacobson, and several logic courses under Dr. Jon Barwise (known for infinitary logic) and Dr. Abraham Robinson (known for non-standard analysis). I was a student in an interdisciplinary PhD program and my advisor, Dr. Frederic Fitch, was in the philosophy department. My thesis work was in the fields of combinatory logic and the lambda-calculus.

As a professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at Georgia Tech, I did research in logic, automata theory, and formal languages. At Wayne State University, I became interested in the theory behind relational databases. When my future colleague, Dr. Ramesh Jain, joined our department, we conducted joint research in image database management and helped lay the foundation for the future field of content-based retrieval. After joining the University of Michigan-Dearborn, I continued with my research into multi-modal content-based retrieval. I have recently become interested in natural language processing and my students and I are conducting research in concept retrieval, using the representations we developed for images and video in the textual arena. After all, isn't text part of the multimedia landscape?