About me

Hi! I’m Ben, a third-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Brown University advised by George Konidaris. My research focuses on the language grounding problem, and I draw inspiration from linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind/language, and semiotics.

I’m honored to be a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Brown University Morgan Edwards Fellowship. In 2023, I had the privilege of serving as the lead organizer for the Brown Robotics Talk Series. I was also a founding member of the Brown AI Safety Team.

Research Philosophy

Human perception and action systems induce a rich and highly structured decision process — natural language serves as a medium to express information about this decision process. My earlier works involve highly engineered solutions to the language grounding problem using a formal language for describing Markov Decision Processes as a semantic representation, my newer work leverages multi-agent RL to generate synthetic languages about decision processes.

I maintain a (not always up to date) record of my academic readings, with papers cataloged here and books listed here.

News

Personal Interests

I enjoy reading, watching movies, playing ultimate frisbee, playing piano, listening to music, and solving Rubik’s Cubes (my personal best for a 3-by-3 is 9.58s, and my best Ao5 was ~12s). I also practice mindfulness meditation and was briefly a frequenter of LessWrong.