I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington and PI of the Computational Minds and Machines lab. My goal is to create computational models that explain how the mind works and draw on insights from how people learn, think, and act to build smarter and more human-like artificial intelligence. I are currently recruiting PhD students. Please apply through the UW CSE and Foster School PhD programs. Interested students should mention my name in their application.

I focus on the challenges of social intelligence and have worked on:

• Social Learning: People readily infer the hidden contents of other people’s minds and learn what they know, want, and think often from just a few sparse observations. How do we learn from cumulative culture and or “upload” our discoveries through teaching and communication? Can we build machines with “Theory-of-Mind” that learn from people as quickly and intuitively as we do?

• Cooperation: We collaborate with others to accomplish together what none of us could do on our own. How do we share the benefits of cooperation fairly and trust others to do the same? Can we build machines that collaborate with people as flexibly as a friend or colleague?

• Morality: What are moral values, how do we learn them so quickly, and why do we generalize them so widely? Where do our moral values come from and where are they going? Can we build moral machines that are aligned to our values and autonomy?

Recent breakthroughs in cognitive science, made possible by new tools from machine learning, are allowing us to give formal answers to these questions for the first time. To this end, I build models that integrate the best features of probabilistic causal models, deep and reinforcement learning, and game theory. These models give precise accounts of human social cognition and make fine-grained predictions that I test empirically in multi-player behavioral experiments.

I earned my PhD in Computational Cognitive Science from MIT, advised by Josh Tenenbaum, where I received fellowships from the Hertz Foundation and NSF. Previously, I was a Marshall Scholar in Statistics at Oxford advised by Tim Behrens, a Fulbright Fellow in Beijing with Scott Rozelle, and before that was an undergraduate at Stanford where I worked with John Huguenard. Finally, I co-founded two AI companies: Common Sense Machines and Diffeo. I grew up in Santa Monica and outside of science, I enjoy surfing, skiing, and sushi.