I am a 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. Before that, I earned a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.
Publications
Yu, D., and Thompson, B.D. (2024). People balance joint reward, fairness and complexity to develop social norms in a two-player game. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [paper]
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]