Research Seminar: Neil Bramley

The Speaker

Neil studies how people represent the actual world and think about its alternatives, plus how they use these abilities to plan, imagine, explain, blame and solve problems. He generally uses interactive experiments and games combined with computational modelling to investigate these issues.

Much of his research has studied how people use interventions (roughly, actions that “tinker” with causal variables in an environment or system of interest) to learn about relevant causal relationships. A major output of this work is a theory of incremental, boundedly rational human learning in which wholesale belief change takes place through a sequence of targeted local changes.

Some of his research is funded by an EPSRC New Investigator Award on Computational Constructivism: The Algorithmic Basis of Discovery. In this project, Neil and colleagues are exploring accounts of how people discover and construct novel theories and hypotheses. This line of work incorporates probabilistic grammars and “program induction” ideas to model human and AI theory generation in compositional theory spaces.

See here for more information.

The Seminar

In this event in a series, speakers from within the Hub, the University, and the broader research community tell us about their research. Our Research Seminar Series involves speakers covering a broad range of themes surrounding our Hub’s interests, so we’ll hopefully all learn something interesting. Whether you want to learn to inform your own research or to simply satisfy a personal curiosity, we hope to see you there.

Attend In-Person or Online

Where: Steve Howard Room 5206, Level 5, Melbourne Connect
Online: Join the zoom here Meeting ID: 881 8112 1134 Passcode: 081124