Title: Visiting Assistant Professor

Email: mfinegol at stat.cmu.edu

Webpage: http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~mfinegol/

Research Interests:

I am interested in applying statistical methods to solve practical real-world problems - almost all of my research is motivated this way. These real-world problems come from consulting clients (currently in legal cases and edcuational testing); from my appointment with LARC (Living Analytics Research Centre); from other departments at CMU (Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, for example); and from the wide world beyond our doors (including one super-secret project sprung entirely from my own imagination, details of which I am not at liberty to share - please keep this quiet). While this leads to a variety of research projects, one common theme is network inference. From different data types (gene expression levels, digitized texts, chat messages, transactions histories, etc.) what can we infer about the existence, strength, and type of relationship between various entities (usually people - but sometimes genes, for example - and usually living people - but not always. Francis Bacon, for one, is dead). I am currently working on network problems with applications to social science, consumer behavior, and genetics.

Bio:

Mike Finegold is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University and the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. He received an A.B. in Mathematics at Princeton University in 1995, worked as management consultant in the US, UK, and Hong Kong for several years, founded a math enrichment program in Boston, and then completed a Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Chicago in 2010.