cognitive tools lab

reverse engineering the human cognitive toolkit

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September 23, 2024: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the Workshop on Analyzing High-dimensional Traces of Intelligent Behavior, Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles.

September 17, 2024: We welcome new PhD student Linas Nasvytis to the lab!

September 17, 2024: We welcome new PhD student Alexa Tartaglini to the lab!

August 21, 2024: A multidisciplinary team led by Maneesh Agrawala and includes Judy Fan, Kayvon Fatahalian, Tobi Gerstenberg, Nick Haber, Hari Subramonyam, and Jiajun Wu has been awarded a 2024 Hoffman-Yee grant from Stanford HAI, for the project, “Integrating Intelligence: Building Shared Conceptual Grounding for Interacting with Generative AI!”

August 16, 2024: Holly Huey successfully defended her PhD dissertation, “Adaptive Visualization Strategies across Drawings, Diagrams, and Data Visualizations!” Holly is moving on to an Applied Cognitive Scientist role at Adobe. Congratulations, Dr. Huey!!!

July 10, 2024: We welcome new IRiSS predoc fellow Kristine Zheng to the lab!

July 1, 2024: We welcome postdoc Junyi Chu to the lab! Dr. Chu is also a member of the Social Learning Lab.

June-July, 2024: Kartik Chandra, Anne Harrington, Sean Anderson, Katherine Collins, Christopher Kymn, Kushin Mukherjee, Arnav Verma and Judy Fan are co-organizing a pre-conference workshop at CogSci 2024, “COGGRAPH 2024: Building bridges between cognitive science and computer graphics”!

June 12, 2024: Judy Fan, Christopher Potts, Lace Padilla, & Elisa Kreiss received funding support from the National Science Foundation for their project, “Improved Measures of Data Visualization Literacy to Advance Research and Assessment in STEM Education!”

June 5, 2024: Haoliang Wang successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “Learning structured representations for generalization in the physical world!” Haoliang is moving on to a postdoc at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Congratulations, Dr. Wang!!!

May 14, 2024: Will McCarthy successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “Cognitive consequences of physical assembly!” Will is moving on to a position at Autodesk Research. Congratulations, Dr. McCarthy!!!

April 10, 2024: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk in Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

March 5, 2024: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk in Language Science at the University of California, Irvine.

March 1, 2024: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk in Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

February 7, 2024: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk as part of the Stanford HAI Seminar Series. Watch the recording.

February 7, 2024: Judy Fan is giving an invited colloquium talk at TU Darmstadt.

February 1, 2024: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the Stanford AI + Education Summit. Watch the recording.

November 1, 2023: Judy Fan gave the closing keynote at the User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) meeting in San Francisco, CA!

September 17, 2023: We welcome new PhD student Sean Anderson to the lab!

September 1, 2023: We welcome postdoc Erik Brockbank to the lab! Dr. Brockbank is also a member of the Causality in Cognition Lab.

August 14, 2023: We welcome new Lab Manager Arnav Verma to the lab!

July 26-30, 2023: In addition to our lab’s papers that will be presented at CogSci 2023, Judy Fan is co-hosting a workshop with Lionel Wong, Wai Keen Vong, and Marcelo Mattar, entitled, “How does the mind discover useful abstractions?” In addition, Felix Binder, Judy Fan, Yoni Friedman, Logan Cross, Robert Hawkins, and Dan Yamins are co-hosting a workshop entitled “Advancing Cognitive Science and AI with Cognitive-AI Benchmarking.” Judy Fan is also giving an invited talk at the symposium, “Marks and Meanings: new perspectives on the evolution of human symbolic behavior.”

July 4, 2023: Judy Fan is an instructor at the Computational Summer School on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS)!

June 18, 2023: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the 7th Annual Center for Human-Compatible AI Workshop in Pacific Grove, CA!

May 19, 2023: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the Studies in Language, Information, Meaning, and Expression Workshop at the University of California, Los Angeles!

May 19-24, 2023: Several members of the lab presented their work at the Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting in St. Pete’s Beach, FL!

May 11, 2023: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the Imagistic Cognition Workshop at the University of Salzburg!

May 4, 2023: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the Neurosymbolic Generative Models Workshop at International Conference on Learning Representations!

April 24, 2023: Congratulations to Xuanchen Lu on his paper’s acceptance to International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)! Please see our Papers page for details.

April 20, 2023: Judy Fan, Christopher Potts, & Elisa Kreiss were awarded a Generative AI for the Future of Learning Seed Grant from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. See this announcement for details.

April 6, 2023: We had 4 papers accepted to the 2023 Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting! Please see our Papers page for details.

March 23, 2023: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the “Learning and generalization in humans and machines” Symposium at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

March 10, 2023: Judy Fan is giving a talk in Cognitive Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

February 17, 2023: Judy Fan is giving a talk in Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University!

January 9, 2023: Judy Fan is giving a talk in Psychology at the University of Oregon!

Dec 8, 2022: Congrats to Zoe Tait, Hannah Lloyd, and Erik Brockbank for winning a Best Presentation Award at PsychTERMS for their work on understanding how student attitudes and engagement relate to academic achievement in introductory statistics courses!

October 24, 2022: Judy Fan is giving invited talks at the “Visual Object-oriented Learning meets Interaction (VOLI): Discovery, Representations, and Applications” and “Language for 3D Scenes” Workshops at European Conference on Computer Vision!

September 26, 2022: Judy Fan is giving a talk in Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced.

August 25-28, 2022: Judy Fan is co-organizing a Generative Adversarial Collaboration entitled, “To what extent does the brain simulate the external world?” and moderating a Keynote & Fireside Chat entitled, “Drivers of learning across timescales: evolutionary, developmental, and computational perspectives” at the 2022 Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Meeting.

August 8-12, 2022: Judy Fan is participating again as a faculty member at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.

August 5, 2022: Judy Fan is giving a talk at the University of Surrey Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP)!

July 28, 2022: Felix Binder, Kanishka Misra, Jay McClelland, and Judy Fan are co-organizing the Neural Networks for Cognition discussion group at CogSci 2022. This year’s theme is: “How can we tell how well a neural network is emulating human behavior?”

July 27, 2022: Holly Huey, Kushin Mukherjee, Tim Rogers, and Judy Fan are co-organizing a pre-conference workshop at CogSci 2022, “From Images to Symbols: Drawing as a Window into the Mind”!

July 18, 2022: Judy Fan is giving an invited talk at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

June 20, 2022: Judy Fan is co-organizing a workshop on “Sketch-Oriented Deep Learning (SketchDL)” at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)! She is also giving an invited talk at a workshop on “Artificial Social Intelligence”, as well a talk at a tutorial on Graph Machine Learning for Visual Computing.

May 27, 2022: Congratulations to Zoe Tait on being awarded a Summer URS Chancellor’s Research Scholarship for Social Sciences!

April 12, 2022: We had 5 papers accepted to the 2022 Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting! Please see our Papers page for details.

April 6, 2022: Judy Fan is giving a talk in Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

April 1, 2022: Congratulations to Justin Yang on being awarded a 2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

December 10, 2021: Congratulations to Sirui Tao and Jane Yang on receiving a 2022 Triton Research & Experiential Learning Scholars (TRELS) research fellowship to continue their research in the lab!

December 7, 2021: Judy Fan participates in a panel discussion on compositionality as part of the “Out-of-distribution generalization and adaptation in natural and artificial intelligence” workshop at NeurIPS 2021!

November 17, 2021: Judy Fan is a guest on the Oscillations Art podcast on the episode, “Cognitive technologies for communication,” featuring research from the lab!

November 5, 2021: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the “Beyond the Button Press: Studying the Mind Through Drawings” Symposium at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society!

November 1, 2021: Judy Fan gives a keynote talk at the Configural Processing Consortium meeting, co-located with the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society!

October 28, 2021: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the University of Edinburgh Computational Cognitive Science Seminar!

October 8, 2021: Judy Fan gives an invited talk as part of the Neurosym seminar series!

September 16, 2021: We welcome new PhD student Hannah Lloyd (PSYC) to the lab! Also, Justin Yang will be inaugurating the role of lab manager!

July 26, 2021: Judy Fan gives invited talks at the “Symbolic and sub-symbolic systems in people and machines” and “Using games to understand intelligence” workshops, as well as the “Neural network models of cognition” affinity group at CogSci 2021!

June 27, 2021: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute! Watch it here.

June 19, 2021: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the 1st Annual Sketch-Oriented Deep Learning (SketchDL) Workshop at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)!

June 18, 2021: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging!

May 20, 2021: Congratulations to Zhe Huang on receiving a 2021 Triton Research & Experiential Learning Scholars (TRELS) summer research fellowship! Congratulations also to Xuanchen Lu for receiving a Research Perseverance During COVID Award from the UCSD Department of Psychology!

April 13, 2021: We had 10 papers accepted to the 2021 Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting! Please see our Papers page for details.

April 9, 2021: Judy Fan gives a virtual talk as part of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s HAMLET (Human, Animal, and Machine Learning: Experiment and Theory) seminar series!

April 6, 2021: Judy Fan was awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for the proposal, “Mechanisms enabling the flexible expression of visual concepts!”

February 24, 2021: Judy Fan gives a virtual colloquium talk at Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences!

December 7, 2020: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Cognitive Science!

December 1, 2020: Judy Fan and Dorsa Sadigh were awarded a research grant from the Office of Naval Research: Science of Autonomy for the proposal, “Harnessing human intelligence for adaptive human-robot collaboration!”

October 29, 2020: Our paper, Emergence of compositional abstractions in human collaborative assembly, was accepted for presentation at the NeurIPS Workshop on Object Representations for Learning and Reasoning!

July 12, 2020: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the Workshop on Emergent Behaviors in Human-Robot Systems at Robotics: Science & Systems!

June 30, 2020: Judy Fan gives an invited talk at the USC School of Philosophy’s Mind and Language Seminar Series!

June 22, 2020: Our paper, Rapid policy updating in human physical construction, was accepted for a spotlight presentation at the ICML Workshop on Object-Oriented Learning!

June 22, 2020: Our paper, Library learning for structured object concepts, was accepted for a poster presentation at the ICML Workshop on Object-Oriented Learning!

June 15, 2020: Judy Fan, Emma Geller, and Celeste Pilegard were awarded a grant from the Course Development and Instructional Improvement Program for their proposal, “Enhancing the Psychology core methods curriculum: a new emphasis on computational literacy, open-science practices, and project-based collaboration!”

May 20, 2020: Lab undergrad Justin Yang was awarded the Summer URS Chancellor’s Research Scholarship for Social Sciences!

May 1, 2020: Our paper, Learning to build physical structures better over time was accepted for oral presentation at the 2020 Cognitive Science Society Meeting!

April 26, 2020: Judy Fan gives a talk on some of our research at the Workshop on Bridging AI and Cognitive Science at ICLR 2020. Link to recording of her talk.

February 19, 2020: Our paper, Relating Visual Production and Recognition of Objects in Human Visual Cortex has been published in Journal of Neuroscience!

January 22, 2020: Lab undergrads Julia Xu and Justin Yang receive Halicioglu Data Science Institute’s Undergraduate Scholarships to support their research in the lab!

September 12, 2019: We welcome PhD students Holly Huey (PSYC), Will McCarthy (COGS), and Haoliang Wang (PSYC) to the lab!

September 5, 2019: Our paper, Pragmatic inference and visual abstraction enable contextual flexibility in visual communication has been published in Computational Brain & Behavior!

July 22, 2019: Our paper, GeoGlot: Learning to Ground Referential Language in Geometry was accepted to the 2019 International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)!

April 17, 2019: Our paper, Collabdraw: an environment for collaborative sketching with an artificial agent was accepted to the 2019 ACM Creativity & Cognition Meeting!

April 12, 2019: Our paper, Disentangling contributions of visual information and interaction history in the formation of graphical conventions was accepted for oral presentation at the 2019 Cognitive Science Society Meeting! Also, Megumi Sano was recognized with the inaugural Sayan Gul Travel Award. Congrats, Meg!

April 12, 2019: Our paper, Developmental changes in the ability to draw distinctive features of object categories was accepted for oral presentation at the 2019 Cognitive Science Society Meeting!

April 12, 2019: Our paper, Conveying semantic part information in drawings was accepted for presentation at the 2019 Cognitive Science Society Meeting!