Peter Drake

I am the faculty advisor to three clubs: our student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Gaming Society (I own over 300 board games), and Fire Arts (I perform with fire staff and Samoan fireknife).

See my website for more information.

Specialty

Data science, machine learning, software development

Academic Credentials

PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington 2002

MS in Computer Science, Oregon State University, 1995

BA in English, Willamette University, 1993

Research

Arriving at LC in 2002, I built artificially intelligent programs to play the classical Asian game of Go. My work was cited in the 2016 Nature article on the AlphaGo program, the first to defeat top human players.

Since then, I’ve been collaborating with colleagues in Environmental Studies. With atmospheric scientist Jessica Kleiss, I’m building deep convolutional neural networks to identify clouds in photos of the sky — a challenging problem of interest to climate modelers. With geologist Liz Safran, psychologist Erik Nilsen, and media scholar Bryan Sebok, I’m studying (and building) video games as a tool to teach people how to prepare for the looming Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake; we were recently awarded a half-million-dollar National Science Foundation grant for this project.

I work with undergraduate student researchers on these projects every summer.