About me

Hi! I’m beginning the second year of my PhD in Computer Science at Brown University and I’m advised by George Konidaris, and I also work with Ellie Pavlick and Stefanie Tellex. My research is focused on endowing embodied agents with language understanding, and my approach to making progress on this problem is heavily inspired by literature on the nature of language and concepts from many classical fields such as linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind/language, and semiotics.

I’m grateful to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research 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.

My approach to solving this problem is inspired by ideas in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind/language, and semiotics. I track almost all the academic papers and books I read, the lists are available publicly here and here. Feel free to reach out and ask about anything in my library!

Personal Interests

I enjoy reading, watching movies, surfing, bouldering, going to the gym, playing and 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). I’m also a frequent reader of LessWrong (here’s my profile if you’re curious), an avid listener of the Making Sense podcast, and I do mindfulness meditation.