.
The shock from Brennans death is still raw for Bresler, and it derailed his research for a time.
Beyond his own prodigious capabilities and creativity, he had this amazing ability to listen to an idea of mine that was almost completely wrong, extract from it a useful piece, and then pass the ball back, he says. We had the same vision for what we wanted to achieve in the work, and we were driven to try to tell a certain story. At the time, almost nobody was pursuing this particular line of work, and it was in a way kind of lonely. But he trusted me, and we encouraged one another to keep at it when things seemed bleak.
Those lessons in perseverance fuel Bresler as he and his students continue exploring questions that, by their nature, are difficult to answer.
One area hes worked in on-and-off for over a decade involves learning graphical models from data. Models of certain types of data, such as time-series data consisting of temperature readings, are often constructed by domain experts who have relevant knowledge and can build a reasonable model, he explains.
But for many types of data with complex dependencies, such as social network or biological data, it is not at all clear what structure a model should take. Breslers work seeks to estimate a structured model from data, which could then be used for downstream applications like making recommendations or better predicting the weather.
The basic question of identifying good models, whether algorithmically in a complex setting or analytically, by specifying a useful toy model for theoretical analysis, connects the abstract work with engineering practice, he says.
In general, modeling is an art. Real life is complicated and if you write down some super-complicated model that tries to capture every feature of a problem, it is doomed, says Bresler. You have to think about the problem and understand the practical side of things on some level to identify the correct features of the problem to be modeled, so that you can hope to actually solve it and gain insight into what one should do in practice.
Outside the lab, Bresler often finds himself solving very different kinds of problems. He is an avid rock climber and spends much of his free time bouldering throughout New England.
I really love it. It is a good excuse to get outside and get sucked into a whole different world. Even though there is problem solving involved, and there are similarities at the philosophical level, it is totally orthogonal to sitting down and doing math, he says.
