Predictions about future reward drive many (if not all) of our thoughts and behaviors. However, important rewarding events—getting good grades on exams, establishing meaningful relationships, buying your first home—are few and far in between. To work towards these events, we must also predict which behaviors and which intermediary events will bring these rewards into fruition—that studying in a particular manner will provide us with good grades, that some types of social interactions will establish trust and depth of connection, that certain spending habits will facilitate saving for our first home.
Currently, I am a research fellow in Harvard’s Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence. To think about these questions, I aim to draw from and advance deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms that describe human learning and generalization. While my training is in machine learning, I hope to collaborate broadly with neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. Please reach out!
I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, where I studied deep reinforcement learning with Satinder Singh, Honglak Lee, and Richard Lewis, and was supported by the NSF GRFP and a Rackham Merit Fellowship. During my PhD, I was fortunate to spend significant time at DeepMind working with Murray Shanahan, Daniel Zoran, and Danilo Rezende. I got my first stint in ML in a CS M.S. at USC, where I worked with Yan Liu on machine learning for healthcare. Before then, I earned a B.S. in Physics at Stony Brook University where I worked with Axel Drees on computational nuclear physics.
If you’re interested in characterizing the brain’s learning algorithms with machine learning (in particular, deep reinforcement learning), please reach out. I am always open to mentoring passionate and motivated students. I especially encourage students from groups underrepresented in cognitive science, neuroscience, or AI to reach out. I would not be where I am without the help of others.
Feel free to contact me at wcarvalho92[at]gmail.com
I also maintain a collection of resources for
