I am a Computational Cognitive Scientist affiliated with Harvard SEAS and MIT BCS. My interests span the study of intelligence (natural), intelligence (artificial), intelligence (collective), and intelligence (moral). My goal is to create computational models that explain how the mind works and draw on insights from how people learn and think to build smarter and more human-like artificial intelligence. I focus on social intelligence and have worked on:

• Social Learning: How do we infer the hidden contents of other people’s minds and learn what they know, want, and think? Or distinguish friend and foe based on just a few social interactions? How do we “download” knowledge from a cumulative culture 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: When should we cooperate with others and when should we compete? How do we coordinate on shared goals to achieve together what none of us could achieve on our own? Can we build machines that collaborate with us as flexibly and fairly 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? How should we build moral machines? Will they amplify our biases or help us overcome them?

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 evolutionary 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 companies: Common Sense Machines and Diffeo. I grew up in Santa Monica and outside of science, I enjoy surfing, skiing, and sushi.