About

I am an associate professor at Occidental College, in the Cognitive Science and Computer Science departments. My research is broadly on the strategic search for knowledge. How does an agent recognize that more knowledge is needed? What knowledge should it search for, and how does it combine primitive search operations to do it? And when it receives an answer, how does it verify its accuracy, or when does it give up? Specifically, I am interested in:

• human information seeking behavior
• memory mechanisms in agent architectures
• inference in semantic networks
• reinforcement learning of memory use

I also write about my adventures at Occidental at How to Start a CS Department.