I am the co-founder and president of Basis Research Institute, an organization developing universal reasoning systems to help solve complex scientific and societal problems. Previously, I was the inaugural Alan Kanzer Innovation Scholar at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute and Data Science Institute. I completed my postdoctoral fellowship at MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) under Armando Solar-Lezama and within Joshua Tenenbaum’s Computational Cognitive Science group. I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Statistics from MIT.

I am from London. I have two big brothers: Kibwe who cofounded architecture/animation studio Factory Fifteen and musician/designer/artist Gaika.

What do I do

My research aims to understand human reasoning—how people derive knowledge from observing and interacting with the world. To achieve this, I construct computational and statistical tools to advance causal reasoning, probabilistic programming, and scientific model discovery. At Basis, we develop and apply these tools to address problems in areas such as epidemiological modeling, automated science, and engineering design.

I like to design little programming languages that synthesize these ideas, such as Omega.jl.

What do I do (with less the mumbo jumbo)

I have two goals. First, is to understand how humans reason, which is to say, how they come to derive knowledge from observing and interacting with the world. Second, I aim to construct tools that advance science, engineering and (hopefully) the humanities. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a sizable chunk of fertile ground that allows me to do both more or less simultaneously.