About me

Hi! I’m Ben, a third-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Brown University, working under the guidance of George Konidaris and Stefanie Tellex. My research focuses on bridging natural language with structured decision-making, drawing inspiration from linguistics, psychology, 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.

Research Philosophy

My research is grounded in the hypothesis that the human brain and body induces a rich and highly structured decision process. Following the tradition of linguistics, natural language serves as a medium to express information about this decision process. While my earlier work was concerned with engineered solutions to this language grounding problem using a formal language for semantics, my newer work takes a different approach to this problem using the tools of RL applied to emergent communication to generate synthetic languages about underlying environments.

My work is deeply influenced by interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind/language, and semiotics. I maintain a comprehensive record of my academic readings, with papers cataloged here and books listed here. I welcome discussions about any aspect of my research or reading list!

Personal Interests

I enjoy reading, watching movies, playing ultimate frisbee, surfing, bouldering, going to the gym, playing piano, listening to music (I’m a bit of an audiophile), playing pool, and solving Rubik’s Cubes (my personal best for a 3-by-3 is 9.58s, and my best Ao5 was ~12s). In recent times I was a frequent reader of LessWrong (here’s my profile if you’re curious), an avid listener of the Making Sense podcast, and did mindfulness meditation.