Dhara Yu

Your Photo
Blog

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

I am interested in understanding the computational principles that underlie social intelligence: how do intelligent agents solve the problems that arise when interacting with others, and what are the distinct benefits conferred by interaction? In particular, I am interested in understanding how people and AI systems develop abstractions such as social norms to coordinate joint action, and the core social learning and reasoning capabilities that underlie this.

I've also excited about using AI tools to analyze more complex and open-ended forms of behavioral data, e.g. by studying traces of interactive reasoning at scale.

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.

Publications