About Me

I am an incoming Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Natasha Jaques and Max Kleiman-Weiner. I’m broadly interested in algorithms for learning, interaction, and memory that give rise to artificial and natural intelligence. Specifically, my research tries to tackle some of the key challenges of understanding social intelligence in machines and humans, such as:

• Social Learning: How can we efficiently and continuously learn skills from others that guide our exploration and help us accomplish novel tasks quicker? How can we use social interactions to constrain our search over valid causal models of the world? How do communities transmit knowledge to each other within a lifetime and over the span of several generations to increase individual and group prosperity?
• Theory-of-Mind: How do we come to infer the content of other peoples’ minds rapidly? Can we build machines that have the ability to recursively reason about the hidden mental states of others? How can we accurately estimate our uncertainty about the beliefs and desires of others in a way that allows us to collaborate and communicate effectively?
• Embodied Cognition: Can we provide a computational account for how agents can access and benefit from memory and skillsets distributed across people and cultures? How does a machine’s mode of instantiation and interaction with humans and the environment enable it to solve different problems? Can we use similar tools from physics to understand the social and psycholgoical forces governing the relationships between embodied agents?

I try to draw from cognitive science, philosophy, physics, biology, and economics to solve these questions. To that extent, my work looks to bring together the best aspects of deep and multi-agent reinforcement learning, energy-based and probablistic causal models, evolutionary algorithms, and game theory. I primarily design general algorithms that I look to test in video games where humans and machines interact, but I am also interested in extending my work to real world domains.

Before graduate school, I earned my Bachelors of Arts in Computer Science and Philosophy at Dartmouth College, where I was advised by Alberto Quattrini Li and Jeremy Manning. I also spent two years working as a visiting researcher at MIT, where I was advised by Tianmin Shu and Josh Tenenbaum. I grew up in New Jersey, and outside of research I love mixed martial arts, basketball, and drumming.