I was born and raised in downtown Toronto, in a little known neighbourhood called Bracondale Hill. My father also grew up here in Toronto near what might now be called Greek Town. My mother comes from Westport, County Mayo, Ireland, though she spent most of her formative years in Dublin.

For about as long as I can remember I've been fascinated by computers, robots, and all that sort of thing. I've always enjoyed building things (I was a class I Legomaniac), and learning to program a computer some time in elementary school opened up a world of possibilities. Most of the material taught to me in high school bored me, and so I spent a considerable amount of my free time honing my understanding of technology. I read a lot of science fiction, particularly Isaac Asimov, and was quite taken by the idea of machines that exhibited intelligent behaviour (like learning from experience), and became intrigued by the human brain's tremendous capabilities in this regard. This fascination would cement itself in me many years later when I enrolled in CSC321H, taught by the illustrious and outspoken Geoffrey Hinton.

As an undergraduate, I was rather busy. The summer after my first year of study I joined the Citizen Lab as a programmer, developing tools to aid in the enumeration and cataloguing of state-sponsored Internet censorship. Towards the end of my time as an undergraduate I worked as a Research Assistant in the lab of Quaid Morris, primarily on developing a fast web-based gene function prediction tool. I first joined Morris Lab in May 2006 as a summer student, funded by an Undergraduate Student Research Award from NSERC. In my last year I did some marginally useful collection and processing of astronomical catalogue indices for the Astrometry.net project under the supervision of Sam Roweis.

Outside of academics and research, I served two terms as the elected Vice-President of the Computer Science Student Union, sat on the Department of Computer Science Undergraduate Committee for two academic terms, and TA'ed an offering of CSC384, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" at the University of Toronto Misssissauga campus, under Steve Engels.