Tom Griffiths (Princeton): Distinguished Speaker Series

Part of the 2025 Distinguished Speaker Series.

The University of Chicago Data Science Institute, Department of Statistics, Department of Computer Science, and Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics are proud to announce our 2025 Distinguished Speaker Series. Join us for stimulating talks from leading data science researchers exploring and expanding the fundamental methods and approaches that transform large and complex datasets into knowledge and action.

Bio: Tom Griffiths, Director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab, Princeton University. a research group focused on understanding the mathematical foundations of human cognition, and the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, a new effort that supports innovative research efforts in AI and related fields. I work with graduate students in Psychology, Computer Science, and Neuroscience, as well as other units on campus.

People solve challenging computational problems every day, making predictions about future events, learning new causal relationships, or discovering how objects should be divided into categories. My research investigates how this is possible, first identifying the nature of the underlying computational problems, and then examining whether we can explain aspects of human behavior as the result of approximating optimal solutions to those problems. Since many of the problems people face in everyday life are problems of induction, requiring inferences from limited data to underconstrained hypotheses, these optimal solutions draw on methods developed in statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence research. Exploring how these methods relate to human cognition provides connections between these fields and cognitive science, as well as a way to turn insights obtained from studying people into new formal techniques.