Vael Gates

In 2021 Vael graduated with their PhD in Neuroscience with a focus on computational cognitive science. This fall Vael will start as a postdoc at Stanford HAI / CISAC, where they intend to work on an ethnography of AI researchers.

At UC Berkeley, Vael was advised by Professor Tom Griffiths (a PI at CHAI). Vael’s research is broadly aimed at developing computational models of social cognition. Vael is interested in: How people can infer beliefs and intentions in others, especially by observing others’ actions and employing recursive theory-of-mind (e.g. inverse reinforcement learning, social psychology); Group-level equilibria when agents are collaborating or competing (e.g. game theory, agent-based modeling); and Mechanism design and other ways quantitative characterizations of a phenomenon can be used to predict and shape behavior.

Recently, Vael has worked on two projects related to CHAI’s mission. They have assisted with the paper on solving the cooperative inverse reinforcement learning (CIRL) dynamic game and is working with Professors Anca D. Dragan, Tom L. Griffiths, and Anant Sahai on preference aggregation across agents. More specifically, in the latter project Vael and colleagues have set up a study in which participants are presented with a problem that requires mediating between the preferences of multiple agents. Vael and colleagues take participants’ responses and attempt to explain them using a quantitative model. Their hope is to create a baseline standard of “fair” reactions to the problem—a standard to which the behavior of future AIs can be compared.

Vael wants to continue to approach social cognition and social inference problems from a computational perspective, using probabilistic models and large-scale web-based crowdsourcing to investigate the computational goals and algorithms driving the social mind. By understanding the complex inferences made by human minds, they hope to contribute to the development of artificial intelligence that can collaborate and is compatible with human behavior.

You can learn more at Vael’s website.