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 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 and that natural language serves as a medium to express information about this decision process. My earlier work focused on engineered solutions to the language grounding problem using a formal language for semantic representation, my newer work leverages multi-agent RL applied to emergent communication to generate synthetic languages about underlying decision processes that can be used to ground natural language.

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, playing pool, and solving Rubik’s Cubes (my personal best for a 3-by-3 is 9.58s, and my best Ao5 was ~12s). I am an avid listener of the Making Sense podcast and practice mindfulness meditation. I was also founding member of the Brown AI Safety Team.