About me

Hello, I’m a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at Brown University advised by George Konidaris, Ellie Pavlick, and Stefanie Tellex. My research is on grounding natural language to structured decision-making, and my approach is heavily inspired by thinkers from a number of classical fields including linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind/language, and semiotics.

I also organized the talks for the Brown Robotics Talk Series for the year of 2023.

I’m grateful to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Brown University Morgan Edwards Fellowship.

Research Philosophy

My research focus stems from the hypothesis that humans are interacting with a rich and highly structured decision process that is induced by their perception and action cognition systems, and that natural language is used to express information about this decision process. In this view, understanding language is a matter of 1) modeling the human decision process using formalisms from reinforcement learning (these are often structured Markov Decision Processes), and 2) grounding language to statements about decision processes.

I am deeply inspired by ideas in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind/language, and semiotics. I track almost all the academic papers I read here and all the books I read here. Feel free to reach out and ask about anything in my library!

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, did mindfulness meditation.