About me

I’m an Assistant Professor in the Language Science Department at UCI, where I’m founding the Interactive Cognitive Systems Lab (ICSL). Before joining UCI, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. I obtained my PhD under the advisorship of Naftali Tishby at the Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University. I was also a visiting graduate student at UC Berkeley for two years, where I was affiliated with the LCLab, the Simons Institute, and ICSI. Before that, I was a research intern at IBM Project Debater. I hold a BSc in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the Hebrew University.

My research aims to understand language, learning, and reasoning from first principles, building on ideas and methods from machine learning and information theory. I’m particularly interested in finding computational principles that explain how we use language to represent the environment; how this representation can be learned in humans and in artificial neural networks; how it interacts with other cognitive functions, such as perception, action, social reasoning, and decision making; and how it evolves over time and adapts to changing environments and social needs. I believe that such principles could advance our understanding of human and artificial cognition, as well as guide the development of artificial agents that can evolve on their own human-like communication systems without requiring huge amounts of human-generated training data.