Tom Griffiths

Tom Griffiths is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Princeton, and previously the Director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is interested in developing mathematical models of higher level cognition and understanding the formal principles that underlie our ability to solve the computational problems we face in everyday life. His current focus is on inductive problems, such as probabilistic reasoning, learning causal relationships, acquiring and using language, and inferring the structure of categories. He tries to analyze these aspects of human cognition by comparing human behavior to optimal or “rational” solutions to the underlying computational problems. For inductive problems, this usually means exploring how ideas from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics (particularly Bayesian statistics) connect to human cognition.

You can read more about Prof. Griffiths’ work and accomplishments at his website.