I would like to study problems at the border of computer science, game theory,
and economics. I've wanted to continue to do computer science research since I
left college, but I didn't find my research topic until I was working for a
bookseller writing pricing robots that arbitraged the different prices between
books on online markets.

As a junior in college, I won a summer fellowship to study the application of
neural network problems to the game of go, having neither played the game nor
worked with neural networks before, under an advisor who did not know how to
program. I spent the summer reading, learning to play go, and discovering just
how much I didn't know. I learned a lot, became a terrible go player, and wrote
a survey paper.

As a senior I returned to research, this time with more direction,
working to extend the doctoral research of my department's new professor. This
time I researched and wrote a paper examining the relationship between term
coocurrences and their corresponding values under singular value decomposition.
Although the paper was not accepted anywhere, Google Scholar shows that it's
since been cited 5 times.

After school, I worked a boring job for a year before I found a position with
a company whose main revenue stream was selling used books on several markets
online. I worked with them to improve that system's pricing of books that we
had on hand, and helped develop a system to arbitrage book prices on
different markets. It was here that I developed my fascination with markets,
pricing, and the interaction of computer agents with the human world.

Outside of work, coding has been an important practice for me. At 
http://billmill.org there are links to and articles about projects that I've
hacked on in my spare time. At the book company, one project required me to
draw trees representing flow charts of which books would be kept and which
would be recycled. That project led me to some interesting reading, so I dug
back into the literature and wrote a history of several graph-drawing
algorithms, implementing each algorithms I found from Knuth in 1971 up to
Buchheim in 2002. The resulting article was published in Python magazine.

I've been out of college and experienced a bit of the Real World now, but the
desire to do research has never left me. I'd love to be able to spend my time
thinking and working hard on hard problems.

<CMU>

I'd be particularly interested to work with Dr. Sandholm's team in the Agent
Mediated Electronic Marketplaces Lab. That department's research meshes
perfectly with my interest in the interaction of programs and markets. 

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<MIT>

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<HARVARD>

I'm applying to Harvard because I'm very impressed with the strong work of
the EconCS Group, and I'd like to work with them. 

<NORTHEASTERN>

see sop_ne.txt

<CORNELL>

I'm particularly interested in Cornell because of the strength of the
department's work in the area I'm interested in, the interface of economics and
computer science. A book that Dr. Tardos edited and helped write, "Algorithmic
Game Theory", has served as n excellent introduction to the field, and...
something not too dick-sucking.
