For many Patriots fans the highlight of the AFC championship game was the TurboTax ad featuring a local yokel. And yes, Michael L. Littman is a bona fide professor of computer science at Brown University. Of course if you are into cross-language information retrieval and predictive representations of state you knew this already. His wiki entry adds,
He works mainly in reinforcement learning, but has done work in machine learning, game theory, computer networking, partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. . .
During his time at Duke, he worked on an automated crossword solver PROVERB, which won an Outstanding Paper Award in 1999 from AAAI and competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
My sources tell me (yes, I have sources!) that his appearance in the ad came as no real surprise to his associates in the computer science department. Littman is apparently something of an extrovert. His home page features a picture of him juggling and he can be seen here in “Dancing with the Profs.” Whether or not he’s a genius, I can not say — he looks good on paper, and he is a genuine Ph.D. (from Brown) — but he’s very convincing and natural in this ad. Kind of adorable.
So the hell with you Peyton Manning. We’ve got Littman. (More at The Brown Daily Herald.)
Aw, thanks!