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I am a second year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley, advised by Alison Gopnik. I am in the Cognition and Developmental areas with a Designated Emphasis in Cognitive Science. I am also affiliated with Berkeley AI Research. I am supported by the DoD NDSEG Fellowship and a Chancellor’s Fellowship from Berkeley. I received my BS in Cognitive Science with a Specialization in Computing from UCLA in June 2022 where I graduated with Departmental Honors and Cum Laude. At UCLA, I worked with Tao Gao in the Visual Intelligence Lab and Hongjing Lu in The Computational Vision and Learning Lab. I completed my senior honors thesis in the Psychology Departmental Honors Program with Tao Gao as my faculty sponsor. I was also a part of UCLA's Psychology Research Opportunity Program (PROPS) where I was advised by Patricia Cheng. I was funded by the Dean's Award for Life Science Research during my time at UCLA. I also had the opportunity to be a Summer Intern in 2021 at Yale University working with Yarrow Dunham in the Social Cognitive Development Lab and Julian Jara-Ettinger in the Computational Social Cognition Lab. You can email me at adahmani [at] berkeley.edu |
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My research is at the intersection of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I am especially interested in how we can build artificial intelligence that draws directly from human cognition, particularly in the areas of learning, decision making, and reasoning.
I take inspiration from decades of research showing how humans, specifically children, are able to learn so much about the physical and social world so rapidly and flexibly. Yet, there are certain things that young children can do that are still very far from anything that current state-of-the-art AI can do.
During my PhD, I aim to leverage experimental and computational approaches to better understand the connection between learning, decision making, and reasoning. Recently, I have been focusing on projects centered on automated curriculum learning in humans and machines. Additionally, I am exploring how environmental cues (for example, safety, controllability, predictability) influence an agent’s exploration, learning, and goal generation within its environment.
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