Max Siegel
Max Siegel is a postdoc in the Computational Cognitive Science group at MIT. His Ph.D work in the same laboratory was supervised by Josh Tenenbaum as well as Laura Schulz and Josh McDermott.
Max's research concerns recognition (or "identification") of concepts, in particular novel perceptual concepts, and their productive use in cognition. His thesis proposed that people can interpret a class of unfamiliar perceptual stimuli and scenarios -- compositional concepts -- by composing domain theories or "simulators", and gave behavioral and computational evidence for compositional simulation in adult and child perception and cognition.
Sophie Bridgers
Sophie Bridgers is a Simons postdoctoral fellow in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab; she also works with Dr. Tomer Ullman (Harvard Psychology). Though humans are motivated to cooperate, figuring out how best to cooperate is far from trivial. You must understand what another person wants, you must balance what they want with what you want, and you must plan and execute an action that achieves the negotiated, joint goal. The overarching goal of Sophie’s research is to behaviorally, developmentally, and computationally characterize the social-cognitive mechanisms that support human cooperative decision-making in all of its complexity and nuance: when it is successful, when it backfires, and when it is intentionally subverted. Sophie completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at Stanford University, where she worked with Dr. Hyowon Gweon. She also holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.
Junyi Chu
Junyi Chu is a postdoc at the Harvard Computation, Cognition, and Development Labs with Tomer Ullman and Elizabeth Bonawitz. She completed her PhD in the ECCL, advised by Laura Schulz.
Junyi’s research explores the nature and developmental origins of creative thought, with recent work focusing on play. She designs behavioral experiments to study how people explore and reason in novel situations, and integrates psychological and computational theories to understand when and why thinking is fun.