Fulbright Award for New College’s Bradley Baker

Bradley Baker is a New College of Florida student majoring in mathematics and philosophy and has authored a paper on machine learning for a professional scientific conference. He has been an actor in several plays, performed improv comedy, and was captain of the College’s fencing team.
Baker also is New College’s 82nd Fulbright award recipient, headed to Germany in the fall to continue his work in machine learning, as part of a research group at the University of Hildesheim.
A fourth-year student from Oviedo, Florida, Baker grew up in a family that stressed both science and the arts. His father, an engineer with Siemens, introduced him to computers at a young age, while Brad also performed in leading roles in his elementary school’s productions of “The King and I” and “The Music Man.”
The family moved to Germany for several years, where Baker became proficient in German, and traveled to Switzerland and Romania. They returned to the United States, where Baker attended high school, studying programming and German.
At New College, Baker has been active in community service and extracurricular activities.  He has been an actor with the College’s Windmill Theatre Company, a tutor in the College’s Quantitative Resource Center, and volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, Food Not Bombs, a community arts center and other groups.
New College’s flexible curriculum has allowed Baker to pair studies in the seemingly disparate fields of mathematics and philosophy.
He explains it this way: “Mathematics, for me, works as a way to conceptualize the world. Philosophy, on the other hand, analyzes, questions and criticizes the way we think. Philosophical questions underpin how we think about mathematics: what assumptions we make, how we think about the truth and how the sciences may interact with the world.”
Last summer, he worked at the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, where he developed an algorithm allowing analysis of data stored in separate facilities while still maintaining data subjects’ privacy.   At University of Hildesheim, he will be part of a team doing leading work in distributed matrix factorization, Baker’s field of interest.
Baker expects to graduate from New College in May. After his Fulbright year, he plans graduate studies in machine learning and to possibly pursue a career in “big data” law and ethics.
The Fulbright Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, is the nation’s premier international educational exchange program. It announces awards individually, on a rolling basis; New College may announce more Fulbright recipients this spring.