TED SUMERS COGNITIVE SCIENCE

I'm a fifth-year PhD student advised by Tom Griffiths at Princeton. I'm currently supported by a NDSEG fellowship.

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My research develops computational models of human communication, with an emphasis on real-world consequences.

How will an utterance affect a listener's beliefs and actions?

How do people (and language models) weigh these outcomes?

I'm interested in answering these questions to further our understanding of humans and develop value-aligned LLMs. 

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In 2022 I interned at DeepMind, working on vision-language models. Prior to my PhD, I was a data scientist and engineering manager at Automatic Labs (2013-2014) and Uber (2014-2019).