Backpacking in the Sierra Nevadas

Michael Leece

Ph.D. Graduate Student
Expressive Intelligence Studio
UC Santa Cruz

Contact Info

mleece () soe.ucsc.edu

Department of Computer Science
University of California Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064




About Me

Academic

I am a third year Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, working with Professor Arnav Jhala in the Expressive Intelligence Studio. I am working on advancing to my Ph.D. candidacy, where I plan to focus on learning hierarchical task networks from unlabeled observations in complex, noisy domains (in particular, I plan to use StarCraft:BroodWar replays as action traces and attempt to learn players' intermediate goal structures). I received my Bachelor's in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 2011.

Non-Academic

Outside of school, I enjoy reading, climbing, and backpacking. I'm an admitted SciFi and Fantasy geek, which is what most of my for-fun reading library consists of. I love backpacking, and take a trip with my family to the Sierra Nevadas at least once a year. Getting away from civilization can be amazingly refreshing. Some other hobbies that I enjoy and make time for are ping pong, soccer, playing piano, and board games.

Papers

Leece, M. and Jhala, A. "Opponent State Modeling in RTS games with limited information using Markov Random Fields." Under review.
Leece, M. and Jhala, A. "Reinforcement for Spatial Reasoning in Strategy Games." In the proceedings of AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2013.

Of Interest

Resume