Joe Austerweil Joe AusterweilI'm Joe Austerweil, a first-year psychology PhD student at UC Berkeley. My main advisor is Tom Griffiths in the Computational Cognitive Science lab exploring inductive inferences. I also work with Tania Lombrozo exploring computational accounts of explanations (in particular, pinning down the notion of "generality" and its effects).
My research explores the interconnection between human and statistical solutions to inductive problems. I am interested in using statistical models to garner insight to how the human mind solves problems that plague philosophers and computer scientists. By looking at the assumptions behind these computational models, we better understand the prior assumptions people use to make surprisingly accurate inferences in the underconstrained problems of everyday life. Additionally, I explore infusing these assumptions into state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. I hope to improve their performance on everyday tasks (where people, with surprisingly less data, easily outperform them).In particular, my research focuses on two main areas: rational accounts of biases and representation. I am preparing a conference proceeding on using an extended Bayesian generalization model (from "Generalization, similarity, and Bayesian inference" Tenenbaum and Griffiths 2001 ) to sequences of numbers (like (2,4,6)). We are applying the rational analysis of Oaksford and Chater (1994) to the Wason 2-4-6 task to better understand the confirmation bias. Additionally, I am interested in how representations and their features change with experience, context, and decisions and creating computational models that mirror human performance.
I graduated from Brown University in 2007 with a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics-Computer Science. I used to work with Eugene Charniak and Micha Elsner in the Brown Laboratory for Linguistics and Information Processing (BLLIP). I was (and continue to be) interested in generative modeling of document coherence.
I am also leading an undergraduate reading group on high-level cognition with Joseph Williams.
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