Stephyn G. W. Butcher
Graduate Student, Ph. D. Program
Department of Computer Science
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD

Data Scientist, LivingSocial.

Consultanting Software Engineer/Scientist, Mercury Analytics, Washington, DC

Lecturer, Engineering for Professionals, Whiting School of Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Lecturer (former) Department of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Advisor: John W. Sheppard

MS in Computer Science, 2005, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (JHU)
MA in Economics, 1990, The American University, Washington, DC (AU)
BA in Economics, 1987, The California State University, Sacramento, California (CSUS)

I passed my GBO in September 2011 which means I'm officially ABD (all but dissertation). The countdown to finishing has begun. Until May 2014, you may ask me how my research is going; after that date, you may ask me if I'm done yet.

My research interests focus mainly on topics in machine learning although I'm also keenly interested in programming language and software engineering issues. I've recently become interested in the data science movement because of my background in both programming, machine learning and statistics.

My dissertation research is on (group|party|squad) AI for digital games in the RPG genre (like World of Warcraft). I'm attempting to build models of PC and NPC interactions by mining game logs. The basic idea is to extract appropriate behaviors from the game logs as cases. The collected cases can then be used directly or adapted via a case-based reasoner.

'Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it... We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate ones, brave by doing brave ones.' (Aristotle Niconachean Ethics, Book II, p.91).

Ann O. Kay and Stephyn G. W. Butcher, "Employment and Earnings of Performing Artists, 1970-1990" appeared in Artists in the Work Force: Employment and Earnings 1970-1990, Research Report #37 (3.2Mb), Neil O. Alper, Gregory H. Wassall, Joan Jeffri, Roger Greenblatt, Ann O. Kay, Stephyn G.W. Butcher and Harry Hillman Chartrand, authors. National Endowment for the Arts, Seven Locks Press, Santa Ana, California, 1996.

Stephyn G. W. Butcher and John W. Sheppard, "Distributional Smoothing in Bayesian Fault Diagnosis" IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 58, No. 2, February 2009, pp. 342-349.

John W. Sheppard and Stephyn G. W. Butcher, "A Formal Analysis of Fault Diagnosis with D-Matrices", Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications, 2007.

John W. Sheppard, Stephyn G. W. Butcher and Patrick J. Donnelly, "Demonstrating semantic interoperability of diagnostic reasoners via AI-ESTATE", Proceedings of the IEEE: IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, March 2010. p. 1-10.

John W. Sheppard, Stephyn G. W. Butcher and Patrick J. Donnelly, "Standard Diagnostic Services for the ATS framework", IEEE AUTOTESTCON 2009 Conference Record, Baltimore, MD, September 2009. p 393-400.

John W. Sheppard, Stephyn G. W. Butcher, Patrick J. Donnelly, and Benjamin R. Mitchell, "Demonstrating Semantic Interoperability of Diagnostic Models via AI-ESTATE", Proceedings of the IEEE: IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, March 2009.

Stephyn G. W. Butcher and John W. Sheppard, "Asset-Specific Bayesian Diagnostics in Mixed Contexts". IEEE AUTOTESTCON 2007 Conference Record, Baltimore, MD, September 2007.

Stephyn G. W. Butcher and John W. Sheppard, "Improving Diagnostic Accuracy by Blending Probabilities: Some Initial Experiments", Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX-07), Nashville, TN, May 2007

Stephyn G. W. Butcher, John W. Sheppard, Mark A. Kaufman, Hanh Ha, and Craig MacDougall, "Experiments in Bayesian Diagnostics with IUID-Enabled Data,", IEEE AUTOTESTCON 2006 Conference Record, Anaheim, California, September 2006, pp. 605-614

John W. Sheppard and Stephyn G. W. Butcher, "On the Linear Separability of Diagnostic Models,", IEEE AUTOTESTCON 2006 Conference Record, Anaheim, California, September 2006, pp. 626-635.

John W. Sheppard, Stephyn G. W. Butcher, Mark A. Kaufman, and Craig MacDougall, "Not-So-Naive Bayesian Networks and Unique Identification in Developing Advanced Diagnostics," Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, Montana, March 2006.