Daniel E. Acuna [Available in PDF]

Center for Cognitive Sciences
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
S313 Elliott Hall
75 East River Road
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Office phone:         (612) – 626 9296
Fax:                      (612) – 626 7253
E-mail:                  acuna002@umn.edu
WWW:                  http://www.cs.umn.edu/~acuna
Citizenship:           Chilean (F1 Visa)

Objective

Placement in a post-doctoral or faculty research position

Research interests

I study human sequential decision-making under uncertainty, from perceptual to high-level cognitive tasks. In particular, I develop rational models based on Bayesian Reinforcement Learning to investigate how people integrate structure learning, transfer learning, spatiotemporal abstraction and state factorization into exploration and exploitation. Additionally, I am interested in understanding how humans can solve real-world instantiations of computationally hard problems in a near-optimal fashion. I use statistical physics and computational complexity to uncover statistical regularities of problems and study whether humans exploit these regularities to structurally bias their search schedules.

Keywords: Sequential decision-making under uncertainty, Bayesian reinforcement learning, structure learning, human problem-solving, rational and bounded-rational analysis of behavior

Education

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities		Minneapolis, MN	2010
	Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, GPA: 3.73 Thesis: Rational analysis of sequential decision-making in humans and machines Advisor: Paul Schrater
University of Santiago		Santiago, Chile	2003,2004
	Master of Engineering Sciences in Information Technology Thesis: An algorithm for the Traveling Salesperson Problem based on players of a computer game
	Bachelor in Engineering Sciences and Professional Degree of Engineering in Information Technology (Highest Honors)

Fellowships and awards

NIH Neuro-physical-computational Sciences (NPCS) Graduate Training Fellowship (1R90 DK71500-04)	2008-Present
International Graduate Student Fellowship of the Chilean Council of Scientfic and Technological Research and the World Bank	2006-Present
NIPS 2009 travel award	2008
Master Degree Fellowship, Universidad de Santiago	2003

Research experience

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Minneapolis, MN

2007-Present

o Spring 2007-Present: Invited member of the Video Game Research Group meetings, PI: Dr. Daniel Kersten

o Spring 2007-Present: Member of the Computational Perception and Action Laboratory, PI: Dr. Paul Schrater

o Summer 2009: Summer Research Assistant. Carlson School of Management, Department of Finances. Project title: ''Corporate board's decisions on CEO hiring: matching and learning'', PI: Dr. Rajesh K. Aggarwal.
Designed and programmed models for optimal corporate board's hiring decisions

o April 2008: Wrote IRB application ''Human sequential decision-making under uncertainty'' that included all-online experiments, from collecting consent forms to compensation payment through PayPal.
The participants' information was encrypted to comply with state and federal laws. The stimuli were programmed in Adobe Flash and the data were saved to a remote database (see http://www.cs.umn.edu/~acuna/game/). To date, 65 people from different countries, including USA, Canada, China, India, Australia, and Chile, have participated of the experiment without major intervention.

o Summer 2008: Summer Research Assistant. Project title: Indoor Magnetic Wayfinding for the Visually Impaired, PI: Dr. Paul Schrater
Modeled and implemented a probabilistic tracker based on Particle Filtering that combined magnetic field and dead reckoning inputs from wireless devices

Teaching experience

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities		Minneapolis, MN	2007-2009
	o Spring 2008: Teaching Assistant for ''Quality Assurance and Process Improvement'' and ''Software Testing and Verification'' and ''Exploring Dynamic Languages'' o Fall 2007: Teaching Assistant, ''Statistical Pattern Recognition'' Held office hours, graded homework, updated website and answer questions about the material in online forum o Summer 2007: Summer Research Assistant, Computational Perception and Action Lab, PI: Dr. Paul Schrater o Spring 2007: Teaching assistant ''Software engineering II'' and ''Quality Assurance and Process Improvement'' Graded tests and homework and answer questions about the material in online forum
University of Santiago		Santiago, Chile	2004-2006
	o Instructor: ''Distributed Systems'' (4 semesters), ''Computer Game Development'' (1 semester), ''Optimization Methods for Engineering'' (1 semester) and ''Graduation Seminar I'' (1 semester). These courses required preparation of classes, homework, tests, projects and holding office hours; some projects required students' presentations. Average anonymous student evaluation: 6.7 out of 7. o Undergrad thesis advisor: Advised three students in yearlong research thesis projects. Two of them graduated with highest distinction (maximum grade in thesis project, 7 out of 7)

Professional experience

Security SA (Holding company), Software engineer		Santiago, Chile		2004-2005
	o Participated as Software Engineer and data modeler of large-scale data warehousing project that consolidated data from 11 businesses and about 300,000 customers combined o Responsible for learning and understanding decision makers' needs from different business models, including banking, insurance, insurance brokerage, mutual funds, real estate and travel agency o Participated in early development of data mining infrastructure on top of the data warehouse for cross-selling and up-selling
Repsol YPF (Latin American oil company), Multimedia designer		Santiago, Chile		Sept 2003
	o Developed multimedia interactive presentation for chief of Chilean ads campaign to be presented at Repsol YPF International Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina
CONAF & GTZ, Multimedia designer		Santiago, Chile		July 2003
	o Developed multimedia presentation in German and Spanish about sustainability of forestry in Southern Chile
Telefonica Movistar (world's third-largest mobile company), Developer			Santiago, Chile	2002-2003
	o Developed online simulator of 20 cell phones based on Adobe Flash. The simulators were used 10,000 times per day on average by both the company's Customer Support Department and customers

Publications

Journal article
Acuna, D., Parada, V. (2010) ''People exploit the structure of the computationally intractable Traveling Salesman Problem to find near-optimal solutions'', PLoS ONE (In press)
Conference article
Acuna, D., Schrater, P. (2009) ''Improving Bayesian Reinforcement Learning using transition abstraction'', ICML/UAI/CLT Workshop on Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning 2009 Acuna, D., Schrater, P. (2009) ''Structure learning in human sequential decision-making'', NIPS 2008 Acuna, D., Schrater, P. (2008) ''Bayesian modeling of human sequential decision-making on the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem'', COGSCI 2008
Submitted
Acuna, D., Schrater, P. ''Structure learning in human sequential decision-making'', PLoS Computational Biology
Other publications (non-competitively peer-reviewed)
Acuna, D., Green, C.S., Schrater, P. (2010) ''The rational control of aspiration in learning'', COSYNE 2010 (Abstract and poster presentation) Acuna, D., Green, CS., Schrater, P. (2010) ''Decision-making in unbounded environments using nonparametric Bayesian Reinforcement Learning'', NIPS 2010 Workshop on Bounded-rational analyses of human cognition: Bayesian models, approximate inference, and the brain (Poster presentation) Acuna, D., Parada, V., Schrater, P. (2009) ''Skill acquisition and performance on the Traveling Salesman Problem'', Center for Cognitive Science, Spring Research Day (Poster presentation) Acuna, D., Schrater P. (2009) ''Structure learning in human sequential decision-making'', COSYNE 2009 (Abstract and poster presentation)
In preparation
Acuna, D., Green, C.S., Schrater, P. ''The rational control of aspiration in learning'' Acuna, D., Schrater, P. ''Dynamic factorization of unknown Markov decision processes using Beta process and Pitman-Yor process''

Presentations

Invited talk, (June 2010) "Rational analysis of human sequential decision-making under uncertainty and human problem solving", Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Roadmap Talk NIH NPCS Fellowship (April 2009) ''Rational analysis of human sequential decision-making under uncertainty'', Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota

Academic service

NIPS 2009, NIPS 2010, CogSci 2009

Training Committee member of the Center for Cognitive Science, organized panel discussion on ''Job hunting, hiring process and setting up a new lab in academia''

Memberships

Pre-doctoral full member of the Center for Cognitive Science, University of Minnesota

Cognitive Science Society

Mathematical expertise

Bayesian modeling and learning, control theory, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, mathematical programming, operations research, computational complexity theory, evolutionary optimization methods (''meta-heuristics''), linear and non-linear hierarchical and non-hierarchical regression using Bayesian statistics or maximum likelihood estimation

Technical skills

o MATLAB: Toolbox: Curve fitting, database, genetic algorithm and direct search, optimization, parallel computing, statistics, symbolic math; Simulink, Stateflow; connection to Winbugs

o C/C++: code optimization, standalone dynamically or statically linked libraries, arbitrary-precision arithmetic.

o Mathematica: symbolic mathematics, graphics, dynamic manipulation, demonstrations; automated theorem proving (Theorema package); parallel programming

o Flash & PHP: development of web-based psychological experiments (see http://www.cs.umn.edu/~acuna/game/)

o Winbugs: modeling and learning of complex static and dynamic Bayesian networks including nonparametric objects such as Dirichlet, beta and Bernoulli processes

o R: multilevel/hierarchical regression, exploratory and confirmatory data analysis; connection to Winbugs

o Others: Infer.NET framework, Actionscript, Maple, C#, Java, Scheme, LISP, Haskell, Prolog, Excel VBA; Game programming (2D & 3D)

References

Available upon request