Prof. Max Kleiman-Weiner: Cooperative Minds and Machines

Human cooperation is distinctly powerful. We collaborate with others to accomplish together what none of us could do on our own, share the benefits fairly, and trust others to do the same. These abilities are unparalleled in other animal species and are lacking in our most sophisticated artificial intelligence. What cognitive processes underlie our social intelligence, and how do these distinct abilities contribute to the scale and scope of human cooperation? How can this knowledge be used to design cooperative artificial intelligence that is equally capable of interacting with people? I will present a computational framework based on integrating individually rational, hierarchical Bayesian models of learning together with socially rational, game-theoretic models of cooperation. In computational models and multiplayer experiments, I will show how this framework can explain how cooperative behaviour is generalized: inferring the intentions and reputations of others, distinguishing friend and foe, and coordinating with AI agents and people.

Prof. Max Kleiman-Weiner is is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in the Foster School of Business and Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science. He was previously a fellow at Harvard in the Data Science Institute and Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). He completed a PhD in Computational Cognitive Science at MIT, advised by Josh Tenenbaum, where he was an NSF and Hertz Foundation Fellow. His thesis won the Robert J. Glushko Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Cognitive Science. He has received best paper awards at COGSCI and RLDM for models of human cooperation and the William James Award at SPP for computational work on moral learning. Max Kleiman-Weiner is a Co-Founder of Common Sense Machines and was previously Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Diffeo, a collaborative machine intelligence startup acquired by Salesforce in 2019. Before all that, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Beijing, earned an MSc in Statistics as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and did his undergraduate work at Stanford as a Goldwater Scholar.

Date: Thursday, 20 February
Location: Zoom (access here)
Time: 6:00 PM UK / 10 AM PT