Brenden Lake

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, working in the Computational Cognitive Science Group and advised by Josh Tenenbaum.

I study human cognition through behavioral experiments and computational models. Currently, I am interested in how people discover structure in their environment, such as: learning object categories and learning how categories interact to form rich conceptual systems. This knowledge supports remarkable generalization and adaptation during new experiences. I want to understand the computational principles underlying these abilities, both for understanding humans and for building a more human-like learning capacity in machines.

Office:

MIT Building 46-4053, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139

Email:

brenden at-sign mit dot edu

Education:

Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
M.S. in Symbolic Systems, Stanford University, June 2009.
- Track in computational and statistical approaches to learning and inference
B.S. in Symbolic Systems, Stanford University, June 2009.
- With Distinction; Phi Beta Kappa; Concentration in Cognitive Science

Publications:

Lake, B. M., Salakhutdinov, R., and Tenenbaum, J. B. (2012). Concept learning as motor program induction: A large-scale empirical study. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [Supporting Info.]

Lake, B. M., Salakhutdinov, R., Gross, J., and Tenenbaum, J. B. (2011). One shot learning of simple visual concepts. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [Videos]

Lake, B. M. and McClelland, J. L. (2011). Estimating the strength of unlabeled information during semi-supervised learning. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Lake, B. M. and Tenenbaum, J. B. (2010). Discovering Structure by Learning Sparse Graphs. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Lake, B. M. (2009). Unsupervised and semi-supervised perceptual category learning. Master's thesis. Stanford University.

Lake, B. M., Vallabha, G. K., and McClelland, J. L. (2009). Modeling unsupervised perceptual category learning. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 1(1), 35-43.

Lake, B. M., Vallabha, G. K., and McClelland, J. L. (2008). Modeling unsupervised perceptual category learning. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Development and Learning. Best paper award. Expanded version directly above.

Lake, B. M. and Cottrell, G.W. (2005). Age of acquisition in facial identification: A connectionist approach. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.