TED SUMERS COGNITIVE SCIENCE

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

​

My research uses reinforcement learning and decision theory to study human communication. Theoretically, I'm interested in cultural evolution (how societies accumulate information over generations) and language understanding (which is surprisingly hard to formalize). Practically, I hope to develop artificial systems capable of interacting with and learning from humans. 

 

I'm currently interning at DeepMind, working on large-scale vision-language models. Previously, I was a data scientist and engineering manager at Automatic Labs (2013-2014) and Uber (2014-2019).