About Me

I am a third year 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:

• Multi-Agent Systems: When is a group of agents greater than the sum of its parts? How can coordination and cooperation emerge among self-interested agents without centralized control? What properties of agents, interactions, and environments allow collectives to develop capabilities no individual possesses alone?
• Social Learning: How does learning from others change what individuals and populations can discover? When does the transmission of skills enable cumulative improvement, and when does it produce conformity, exploitation, or collapse? How do these dynamics change when agents can copy one another’s skills and problem-solving machinery - and recursively improve them?
• Complexity and Emergence: How do simple local interactions give rise to agency, organization, and collective intelligence? How do emergent population-level dynamics feed back to reshape individual agents? Are there general principles that determine whether an evolving system becomes cooperative, diverse, and robust - or fragile and unstable?

I try to draw from cognitive science, philosophy, economics, and physics 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 am thankful for receiving the CSERF Fellowship, the ARCS Scholarship, the Sony Focused Research Award, and the Cooperative AI Early Career Grant to support my research.

Before graduate school, I earned my Bachelors of Arts in Computer Science and Philosophy at Dartmouth College, where I was advised by Jeremy Manning, Alberto Quattrini Li, Peter Lewis and Amie L. Thomasson. 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.