I was born in Montreal and grew up in Pittsburgh. I attended Harvard University, where I received a B.A. degree in History and Science, focusing on Applied Mathematics and American History. I worked at Carnegie Group for a few years. I then attended the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where I obtained my Ph.D. in 1994, with U.S. Alumni and NSERC Fellowships. My dissertation is titled "A Minimum Description Length Framework for Unsupervised Learning", and my supervisor was Dr. Geoff Hinton.
I moved to San Diego for a couple years, where I was a postdoc in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. I then became a postdoc in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, supported by a McDonnell-Pew Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellowship. I moved to Tucson, where I held faculty appointments in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. Then in the fall of 2000, I took a leave of absence from Arizona and moved back to Toronto, becoming a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
My research interests cover a range of topics in machine learning, visual perception, and neural coding. Specific interests include unsupervised learning, boosting, perceptual learning, representations of visual motion, multisensory integration, and probabilistic models of neural representations.