Biosketch May, 2014 TUCKER BALCH, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR SCHOOL OF INTERACTIVE COMPUTING, COLLEGE OF COMPUTING GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 150 WORD BIOSCKETCH Tucker Balch’s research concerns multirobot systems and the application of Machine Learning to the understanding social animal behavior. In his work on social animal behavior, Balch assumes that the animals learning systems observe act according to a robot program. Under that assumption he is able to apply formal tools the task of inferring what that program is (e.g., HMMs, POMDPs, SLDSs). This problem is important because biologists and psychologists seek models of behavior to explain their subjects. Earlier approaches provided only partly descriptive models. The models Balch is interested in are complete explanations of behavior because they describe the full behavioral “loop” from sensing to acting. Tucker was a Distinguished Graduate of USAF Pilot Training. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the Georgia Institute of Technology Outstanding Service Award. He is the CTO and co-­‐founder of Lucena Research, a startup that applies Machine Learning to investing.