Jason Rennie's Home Page

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Update 1/29/07: I have graduated! Unlike Mike, Santa did bring me a thesis for Christmas. Check my publications page for the full text. If you think the collaborative filtering stuff is cool, check out StyleFeeder which is a real, live, usable implementation of my thesis work. Find cool stuff on the web, add it to your StyleFeed, rate it and see what else the system thinks you'll like. Now we've got a tech blog.

7/7/07: Helen gave birth to a baby girl: Samantha Lyra Rennie.

5/15/07: Now that I'm writing lots of Java code, I've started a Java Quirks blog.

Hi! I'm a Computer Science PhD candidate (n=∞) at MIT. I'm a member of the CSAIL Lab and often can be found in my office, 32-G496. As a grad student, I take classes, talk to my advisor, go to group meetings and do research.

I'm married to a wonderful lady named Helen Rennie. She is an amazing chef. She teaches Boston area cooking classes, likes creating new and exciting recipes, reviewing restaurants, and writing about food and fish. I enjoy wine and am obsessed with trying to make the perfect loaf of French bread :-)

I'm a computer geek and hence spend a lot of time at a terminal. I often LaTeX my homework and occasionally code things that other people find useful. I've written ifile, an intelligent mail filter, and a perl WordNet module. I also write Matlab, Python and Maple code for my research.

I have a lot of hobbies. I enjoy sports and have tried a lot of them. I enjoy friendly competition. My current favorite sport is disc golf. It's a lot like (ball) golf, except that the distances shorter (e.g. 300 feet), you throw a disc and the "hole" is a raised basket. It's also easier to learn and much less expensive. Courses can be found across the country.

I'm also a sports fan (go Red Sox!) and have recently applied machine learning techniques to the problem of ranking sports teams, especially college teams where the game graph is very sparse---teams play relatively few games outside their conference. Take a look at my college football and basketball rankings.

As I've ventured deeper into academia, I've learned to become more organized (at least with respect to computer-related information). As a result, I maintain quite a few information pages, partially for my own reference. See Stuff I Maintain for a full run-down.

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