This vagabond has finally settled down with a wife, a 9 to 5, and a clean shave! By the time you meet me I might even have kids! I finished my Ph.D and moved to San Diego to work at Qualcomm's R&D group. My wife Kyla and I take weekend adventures, and are enjoying our new home base.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Host, host, host. Surf, surf, surf. If most of your couchsurfing friends are people you've actually hosted or crashed with, you're doing it right! ;)

I've been fortunate to have been able to meet some truly amazing people on CS.

Interests

the life aquatic (surfing, sailing, spearfishing, cliff diving, windsurfing, whitewater/sprint kayaking, distance swimming, waterskiing/wakeboarding/kiteboarding/waterboarding j/k, sonar system research, and recently underwater hockey), travel (of course), cycling, swing & salsa

• design
• dancing
• sprinting
• traveling
• piano
• cycling
• kayaking
• windsurfing
• surfing
• scuba diving
• sailing
• wakeboarding
• hockey
• swimming
• languages
• mathematics

Music, Movies, and Books

Books: The Evolution of Everything, Snow Crash, Mere Christianity, Notes from the Underground, Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air, The Kingdom of God is Within You, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Life of Pi, Born a Crime

Movies: Baraka, City of God, Carandiru, The Fog of War, Touching the Void, The Triplets of Belleville, Serenity, Three Kings, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Miller's Crossing, The Royal Tenenbaums, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Gandhi, Immortal Beloved, The Last King of Scotland, The Lion in Winter, No Man's Land, Shadowlands, Amelie, Before Sunrise, Chasing Amy, Garden State, Big Fish, The Fall, The Last of the Mohicans, Legends of the Fall, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Harakiri, Lucky Number Slevin, Memento, Oldboy, (ask me for the full list)

Music: Zero 7, Abba, Ben Folds Five, Alison Krauss, Nickel Creek, David Grisman, Muse, Eliott Smith, Queen, Dandy Warhols, Tchaikovsky

Plays: Arcadia, Company, The Crucible, Inherit the Wind, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Left Fiji in 2006 just before a Coup that would have grounded my flight (among other not nice things). I left Prague in 2002 just before the 2002 European floods that devastated the region.

More recently in summer of 2011 after attending and presenting at SPARS'11 (a conference in Edinburgh on sparse approximation), I bought a bicycle there, rode it across to the West coast, hopped a ferry for Ireland, and cycled clockwise around; lovely country, lovely people, lots of sheep, and rain...

Here's a map I made of the route I took:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1121927/lasso_circle.png

Teach, Learn, Share

I am an ardent learner. I will absorb rhythms, dance, languages, economic theories, statistical insights, whatever you can teach me. I really should have pressed Daga/Dima to teach me some Python (and especially how to design elegant interfaces for Python scripts), but I was short on time.I am naturally skeptical, but not too cynical, so I believe that misinformation is generally propagated by well-meaning but uncurious people who just happen to have bad sources of information, rather than people who are intentionally trying to deceive.During my Ph.D, I studied under one of the pioneers in "compressed sensing", an exciting new field in applied mathematics that utilizes invariant properties of randomness to uniquely and efficiently infer from a set of randomly constructed measurements the underlying entity being measured, which, despite being relatively large, is sparse, meaning that it lies on a subspace of relatively low dimension, comparable to the dimension of the measured random signal.

Countries I’ve Visited

Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Fiji, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States

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