I am a software engineer at Google Pittsburgh. I received my Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at the School of Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University.  My advisor  was Geoffrey J.  Gordon.  I was a member of the SELECT Lab, which is headed by Geoffrey Gordon and Carlos Guestrin. I used to work with Andrew Moore, and I was also affiliated with the AUTON Lab. See my research page for a list of publications.

I am interested in efficient inference, learning and model selection for low-dimensional representations of dynamical systems, including latent variable models and predictive state representations, from high-dimensional data.  The algorithms I work on require tools from data mining, statistical machine learning, convex optimization, matrix analysis and control theory. I apply my research to sequential data modeling and prediction problems in robot cognition, computer vision and biosurveillance. Recently, I have also been applying my work to audio event detection and robot motion planning.

Before graduate school, I studied Computer Science, Mathematics and Economics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where I worked with Gaurav Sukhatme at the Robotics and Embedded Systems Lab. Prior to that, I went to school in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. My family is originally from northern India, however, and my native language is Urdu.

Email: 
siddiqi at google dot com