I studied Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi where a thesis on the automatic recognition of beats on the Tabla got me interested in the themes of perception, recognition, learning on the one hand and acoustics, music, and language on the other. I came to study at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT where I completed a master's thesis on speech recognition. A taste for theoretical problems and a desire to better understand fundamental possibilities and limitations of automatic learning and recognition by a computer led me to a Ph.D. in learning theory that I submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. During the MIT years, I also interacted considerably with the Departments of Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Science. After my Ph.D., I was briefly a postdoctoral fellow and research associate in the Brain and Cognitive Science Department at MIT after which I joined Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ). I joined the The University of Chicago in 2000.
The interaction of computation and mathematics with brain and cognitive science continues to fascinate me. The particular interaction of learning and language has been the dominant theme of my research.