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 in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, with an eye towards building computational models that can learn in human-like ways. In particular, my research focuses on (1) How people learn concepts and categories with varying levels of supervision (2) How people acquire this knowledge socially, from teaching, question asking to dialog, and (3) How these computational models can be scaled to deal with the complexity found in naturalistic real-world environments, using recent advances from deep learning.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher working with Patrick Shafto at the Cognitive and Data Science Lab at Rutgers University — Newark where I worked on Bayesian teaching and Explainable AI. 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.

You can find a list of all of my publications here or on Google Scholar. Occasionally, I also write about research on my blog. When I'm not doing research, I enjoy reading books and taking photos around NYC.

Feel free to reach out if you're in the NYC area and want to grab coffee. Otherwise, you can e-mail me at waikeenvong [at] gmail [dot] com, or say hello on Twitter @wkvong.