I am a first-year PhD student in Psychology at UC Berkeley, advised by Bill Thompson.

I am interested in the computational foundations of social cognition: what are the cognitive algorithms that shape learning, reasoning and decision-making in social contexts?

I believe that gaining a richer understanding of how we think and behave in groups can help us address pressing societal challenges, including the climate crisis and the ethical development of artificial intelligence. I hope to both advance our fundamental understanding of cognition and intelligence and to apply those insights for tackling real-world problems.

Before my PhD, I spent a year wearing many hats at an early-stage climate tech startup, working on computationally-driven approaches for developing sustainable alternatives to animal agriculture.

Before that, I earned a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, where I worked with Noah Goodman in the CoCoLab and Judith Degen in the ALPS Lab.

Publications

Yu, D., Goodman, N.D., and Mu, J. (2023). Characterizing tradeoffs between teaching via language and demonstrations in multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [paper] [code]

Yu, D., Waldon, B., and Degen, J. (2023). The cross-linguistic order of adjectives and nouns may be the result of iterated pragmatic pressures on referential communication. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [paper] [code]

Yu, D., Mu., J, and Goodman, N.D. (2022). Emergent Covert Signaling in Adversarial Reference Games. In 5th Workshop on Emergent Communication at ICLR 2022. [paper]

Mankewitz, J., Boyce, V., Waldon, B., Loukatou, G., Yu, D., Mu, J., Goodman, N.D., and Frank, M.C. (2021). Multi-party Referential Communication in Complex Strategic Games. In Meaning in Context Workshop at NeurIPS 2021. [paper]