I am a PhD student at the Computer Science Department at UCLA under the guidance of Judea Pearl. I am officially in the field of Artificial Intelligence though my interest is better described as Cognitive Science. In the broadest scope I am interested in two things, the nature of the information processing that goes on in human beings and other animals, and the design of artificial agents that are at least as capable as these biological agents.
Many times these two interests amount to the same line of investigation and sometimes they don't. They can be the same because understanding the high level idealized structure of knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in biological agents can help us design our artificial agents. They can be different because, in the end, we are dealing with two different architectures and maybe designs are not so easily transferable across them, or maybe we can invent better designs without trying to emulate biology.
My current focus however is on designing AI agents based on the structure of biological ones. I believe that the most significant gains are to be made here, and that the primary reason AI agents don't perform as well as biological ones in many interesting tasks is simply because we do not know how to structure the process as well as biological agents do. Within this approach, my more narrow focus is on how knowledge is represented in biological agents. Even more narrowly, I am interested in how causal information is incorporated into the knowledge of biological agents and what the significance of causal knowledge is.
[The rest of this site is under construction]