Brian Gawalt's Homepage.
About Me
I am in my fourth year of graduate school here at U.C. Berkeley.
I'm currently on track for a Ph.D. in electrical engineering,
having just last month passed my preliminary exam. My current work has me
applying convex optimization
and parameter estimation techniques to news articles and their bag-of-words lexical content.
Specifically, I have devised an l1-regularized version of the Naive Bayesian classifier for binary data.
My advisor in these efforts is Prof. Laurent El Ghaoui.
I have a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of
Virginia from the spring of 2005, where I completed a design thesis on blind
modulation detection for digital communication signals.
Graduate Student Instruction
A quick run-down of my TA gigs:
- Fall 2005: CS150, Components of Digital Design (Prof. R. Katz)
- Spring 2006: CS150, Components of Digital Design (Prof. K.
Pister)
- Fall 2006: EE100, Electronic Techniques for Engineers (Prof. B. Boser)
- Spring 2007: EE120, Signals and Systems (B. Ayazifar)
- Summer 2007: EE40, Introduction to Microelectronic Circuits (full-blown instructor!)
- Fall 2007: EE20, Structure and Interpretation of Signals and Systems (B. Ayazifar)
- Spring 2008: EE120, Signals and Systems (Prof. L. El Ghaoui)
Course Work
- Fall 2005: EE 221a, Linear System Theory (Prof. S. Sastry)
- Fall 2005: EE 226a, Random Processes (Prof. J. Walrand)
- Spring 2006: EE 225a, Digital Signal Processing (Prof. M. Gastpar)
- Spring 2006: PHYS 137a, Quantum Mechanics (Prof. J. E. Moore)
- Fall 2006: EE 227a, Introduction to Convex Optimization (Prof. L. El Ghaoui)
- Fall 2006: CS 294-10, Practical Machine Learning (Prof. M. Jordan)
- Spring 2007: EE 223, Stocastic Control Theory (Prof. V. Anantharam)
- Spring 2007: CS C281a, Statistical Learning Theory (Prof. P. Bartlett)
- Fall 2008: MBA 290g, International Trade and Competition in High Technology (Prof. C. Wu)
- Fall 2008: IS 257, Database Management (Prof. R. Larson)