Dhara Yu

I am a PhD student in Psychology at UC Berkeley, advised by Bill Thompson and supported in part by the Cooperative AI PhD Fellowship.

I am broadly interested in understanding the computational principles that underlie social intelligence. Some of the questions I am particularly interested in are:

• How do people and AI systems make inferences about others' intentions, and how can we study these capabilities in ecologically valid settings?
• How do intelligent agents develop new concepts and normative arrangements for coordinating complex forms of joint action?
• How do internal goals and conceptual knowledge transform as a result of interaction with other agents?
• What unique advantages are conferred by learning from traces of social interaction between agents (rather than from a single expert alone)?

I view AI as both an object of study and as a tool to help us overcome methodological challenges in the study of intelligent behavior; I'm particularly excited about its use for principled measurement of more complex, open-ended forms of behavior and for the development of new kinds of theoretical artifacts that promote (human) scientific understanding.

I write about cognitive science, cultural evolution, AI and metascience at Iterated Learnings and on my research blog.

Before my PhD, I spent a year in startup land, and before that, I earned a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.