Blog Posts

Conference on Natural Language Learning 2024

26 minute read

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Keynote Speaker Lorna Quandt

Integrating AI Driven sign language technologies in education recognition generation and interaction. ~300 sign languages in the world, many understudied. Iconic signs are related to the concept that they represent like a plant growing out of the ground. But there are still significant differences across languages.

CyLab Conference Notes

33 minute read

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These are the notes that I made during the CyLab 2024 conference held at Carnegie Mellon University that I attended in September.

Dynamic Decision Making Lab Yearly Review

2 minute read

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The Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory has issued it’s yearly review for 2024 which summarizes the work from the lab that occured during the past year. It is available online here. I have copied below my own section of the yearly review, and encourage people interested in my work to check out the annual summary. This will also be of interest to those who would like to get an idea of the work that goes into running a relatively large research lab in decision sciences.

Multi-University Research Initiative

26 minute read

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This blog post contains my unedited notes that I took while attending the Multi-University Research Initiative Program Review this year. This was an interesting meeting where I presented my work in cognitive models applied onto large languge model to improve their usefullness in educational settings, specifically for phishing email education.

Descisions From Description and Experience

8 minute read

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One of the interesting lines of recearch that I have recently become more involved with is the distinction between making decisions based on description and making them based on experience.

The Future of Cyber Deception

18 minute read

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These are my personal notes taken while attending the Workshop on the Future of Cyber Deception Presented by the Army Research Office held at Carnegie Mellon University.

AAAI Symposium on Generative Models in Cognitive Architectures

18 minute read

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These are my notes I took while attending the AAAI Symposium on Generative Models in Cognitive Architectures in Washington D.C. I had a great experience at this conference discussing the use cases of generative AI models in cognitive modeling.

Applying LLMs in Cognitive Models

4 minute read

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Two submissions our lab has been working on were recently accepted to the AAAI 2023 Fall Symposium Series on the Integration of Cognitive Architectures and Generative Models.

IEEE S&P 2023

22 minute read

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The following are my notes that I took during the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy. It was a great experience and I tired to attend every lecture and find the papers that were discussed during them.

Security and Human Behaviour 2023

9 minute read

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The following are my notes taken during the SHB workshop. I have included the names of presenters but it should be noted that these are my own general thoughs and reactions while attending these presentations.

Learning to Learn

5 minute read

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One interesting development in my research interests is the unexpected focus on ‘learning to learn’ that many of my recent papers and projects have been focused on.

Job Security

7 minute read

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I recently completed the last meeting with a small group of mentees from my alma mater UBC that was put together to give undergraduate students at different points in their career some insight into life after undergrad.

NeurIPS 2022

5 minute read

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This past year I attended the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems for the first time to present a poster alongside a paper that was accepted at the workshop on Information Theoretic Principles in Cognitive Systems.

What’s in a Representation?

4 minute read

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As I begin the final stages of my PhD thesis, I was recently surprised by one topic that jumped out as being more relevant than I had originally thought of when I began work on the project.

Visual Sciences Society Conference 2022

4 minute read

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Earlier this year I attented the Visual Science Society 2022 conference where I gave a talk titled “A Beta-Variational Auto-Encoder Model of Human Visual Representation Formation in Utility-Based Learning”. The entire abstract I submitted is copied at the bottom of this blog post if you would like to read it.

Beyond Reward

6 minute read

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In a previous post I mentioned an interesting paper that made the claim that much of human intelligence could be viewed under the lense of reward maximization, you can see that blog post here..

Rl Web Security

6 minute read

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Since my partner is a web security expert, I often end up having long discussions about internet security, even though my personal knowledge and research is in a very different area.

Wordl with Reinforcement Learning

6 minute read

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This post will discuss briefly the possiblity of constucting a reinforcement learning algorithm to play the game Wordle.

New Year 2022

3 minute read

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Rather than look back at previous research I have done, as the previous posts on this blog have done, this post will look forward to my hopes for 2022 and new research ideas I am interested in. Firstly, the major plans for this year include completing the website hosting my thesis project, submitting a paper based on my work in Theory of Mind for reinforcement learning, and completing my PhD Thesis.

Masters Thesis 2020

3 minute read

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This post is another retrospective, but instead of a conference or journal paper it takes a look at my masters thesis, titled “Modelling Learning and Decision Making Under Information Processing Constraints”. This blog post will go through the begninning stages of the project and how it ultimately narrowed down the focus of the thesis and project into what it eventually became.

AAAI 2021

2 minute read

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This is the second post in a series of retrospectives on previous work I have done that shaped my PhD and are related to my future research goals. If you would like to read the paper you can find it on my Researchgate.

Predicting Human Choice

2 minute read

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This is the first post in a series of retrospectives looking back at papers and conferences I have attended. Now that I am entering my final year of my PhD, I will be begining this as a chronicle of projects, papers and conferences that influenced my time during my PhD.