October 2023: Starting a project with Microsoft Research entitled "Large Language Models and Digital Empathy"!
Oct 2023: Check out our recent paper on Using Large Language Models in psychology, published in Nature Reviews Psychology! In it we discuss the many promises (and challenges) in using LLMs in applications in psychology.
April 2023: Starting a project in collaboration with Toyota Research Institute on developing interventions to increase empathy! Stay tuned for more updates!
Sep 2022: My paper, "Applying Probabilistic Programming to Affective Computing", was selected for the Best of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 2021 Paper Collection!
Aug 2022: Started at UT Austin!
I am a cognitive scientist interested in how people (and computers) reason about other people: how they think and what they feel.
I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and am associated with the inter-departmental Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics group at UT.
Prior to joining UT, I was an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, and a Research Scientist at the Institute for High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR Singapore.
I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
I also hold an undergraduate degree in Economics (summa cum laude) and Physics (magna cum laude) from Cornell University.
I am currently teaching two classes:
June 2022: Honored to receive a Faculty Excellence Teaching Award from the National University of Singapore!
Feb-Apr 2022: We had three papers recently accepted!
The first, in Social and Cognitive Neuroscience, joint work with Shir Genzer, Anat Perry and Jamil Zaki using EEG to study empathic accuracy.
The second in Nature Human Behaviour, a herculean effort led by Amit Goldenberg and Jonas Schöne on emotion perception of emotional expressions over time.
And the third, an intervention to for improving empathy in middle school, another years-long study led by Erika Weisz, will come out in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Mar 2022: Giving an invited talk at SAS 2022! Hope to see you there!
Oct 2021: Honored to receive the Best Paper Award from ACII 2021 for my paper on Ethical Guidelines for Affective Computing!
July 2021: Singapore CogSci Meetup on Tuesday 27th July, at NUS Campus! Please register at the above link if you're interested to attend, as we have to account for social distancing requirements.
As CogSci is being held virtually this year, some members of CogSci proposed to organize local meetups, subject to local pandemic restrictions, as a chance for cognitive science researchers to present research in-person. Please also see this page for more information about this initiative.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there (and at our Affective Cognition workshop!)
June 2021: My Final Year Project student Kong Yan San has won the SoC Outstanding Computing Project Prize! Congratulations to Yan San!
April 2021: We just got awarded a large (~$10M over 4 years) grant from AI Singapore, together with David Hsu and colleagues from NUS, SMU, SUTD, and A*STAR, to build better collaborative AI! Am excited about the potential research opportunities with these amazing colleagues!
April 2021: We are organizing a workshop titled Interdisciplinary Advances in Affective Cognition at CogSci this year, where we want to bring together a diverse group of scholars on the topic of affective cognition. Looking forward to seeing everyone there! (Also, we have two CogSci papers from my lab, on counterfactual emotional reasoning and on observational causal learning. Do check them out!)
February 2021: I will be giving an invited talk at the Emotion Preconference at SPSP, which will be held virtually on 10 Feb. Hope to see you there!
December 2020: Grateful to be able to round off the year with an accepted AERA Open paper (on a really cool explore-exploit-prune model of student resource regulation, together with Patricia Chen and colleagues) and an AAAI paper (on aspect-based sentiment analysis, led by my student Zhengxuan). I hope everyone reading this stays safe as we come to the end of a very difficult year. And here's hoping that 2021 will be a much better year!
August 2020: My Final Year Project student Terence Lim has won the NUS Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize! Congratulations to Terence!