Hello! I’m currently a research scientist at the Center for Data Science at New York University, working with Brenden Lake in the Human and Machine Learning Lab. My primary research interests are at the intersection of computational cognitive science and artificial intelligence, with an eye towards building computational models that can learn language and concepts in human-like ways. I've been awestruck by a lot of of the recent progress made in large language models and multimodal models, and I spend a lot of my time thinking about the implications of their abilities with respect to theories of human cognition. You can read more about my research interests here.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher working with Patrick Shafto at the Cognitive and Data Science Lab at Rutgers University — Newark working on Bayesian teaching. I completed my Ph.D. in Psychology from the Computational Cognitive Science Lab at the University of Adelaide working with Andrew Perfors and Danielle Navarro, looking at the joint role of structure and supervision in category learning.

Here's all of my publications, which you can also find on Google Scholar. Outside of my research, I enjoy reading books and taking photos around NYC. You can always e-mail me at waikeenvong [at] gmail [dot] com.