Michael E. Karpeles [Mek] is a first year Ph.D candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. During his undergraduate career, Mek achieved a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Vermont. In his free time, Michael enjoys celebrating hacker culture, programming, reading, supporting the UVM CSSA (Computer Science Student Association), using GNU Linux (Go Slackware), contributing to Open Source projects, exploring and sharing knowledge via wikipedia and irc, playing/writing/listening to music, cooking, and investing.
While I am fascinated by nearly all aspects in the field of Computer Science, my main research interests lie in the realm of evolutionary and adaptive computation, artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, machine learning, data mining (textual analysis), and computational linguistics / NLP (Natural Language Processing).
These interests have directed me toward several special topics, including the functional programming paradigm (and macro obsession -- specifically the lisp(s) family), programing language theory, supervised and self-driven learning bots, data mining algorithms, and the synthesis of lexical grammars (via tools like lex and yacc). My recent experimentation with neural networks and embedded physics also seem like intriguing avenues.
To date, I've worked on a variety of independent and collaborative research projects with topics relating to neural networks, evolutionary computation, PageRank optimization, wireless sensors (networks), robotics, search engine query processing, expert systems, programming language theory, and machine learning systems.
I also try to remain active as a member of the open source community. My recent contributions include (1) the Webdts framework (originally built for MicroStrain); a web dynamic templating system built over the web.py framework to modularize the process of designing web interfaces, (2) mekchat AI question answering daemon, as well as (3) minor contributions to Open Office. You can frequently find me mek||malloc on IRC on the server: irc.freenode.net in #linux, #slackware, #ubuntu, #emacs, and #python.
I am currently in the process of organizing a portfolio for some of my software projects. Please check back periodically for code, tutorials, research, and more. In the mean time, some old projects can be found: here