Falk Lieder from Max Planck Institute (formerly UC Berkeley) will be giving a talk Tue 16 July 12:30-2:00 pm in Bahen (BA) 5187 (U of T time, talk starts 12:40, runs about 50 minutes). The title, abstract and bio are pasted below. Feel free to forward this on to colleagues or relevant mailing lists, the audience will be multidisciplinary, crossing human-computer interaction, psychology, and machine learning.

Go to the Google Doc at URL tiny.cc/falktalk for information such as:

When he is visiting and how to request a meeting.

The information to watch the live stream and recording of his talk (link

will be added at 12:30 Tue 16 July).

Directions to BA 5187.

Anything else we think of adding or people request.

Rationality Enhancement: Towards theories and tools for helping people become more effective

Abstract: Human judgment and decision-making appear to be riddled with numerous systematic errors. Previous attempts to attenuate these so-called cognitive biases by educating people about them or schooling them in the laws of logic, probability theory, and expected utility theory have had limited success. In this talk, I will outline an alternative approach to improving human decision-making that grew out of rethinking what it means to be rational. In the first part of my talk, I will illustrate that making Herbert Simon’s notion of bounded rationality mathematically precise allows us to derive optimal decision strategies from first principles. In the second part of my talk, I will illustrate how such advances can be leveraged to improve human decision-making. Concretely, I will present an intelligent tutor that can discover optimal planning strategies and helps people to internalize those strategies by providing metacognitive feedback. Finally, in the third part of my talk, I will present a complementary approach that combines artificial intelligence with gamification to help people overcome procrastination and become more productive.

Bio: Falk Lieder is a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems here in Tübingen. His newly established Rationality Enhancement Group strives to lay the cognitive and technological foundations for helping people become more effective. He completed his Ph.D. in Tom Griffiths’s Computational Cognitive Science Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to this, he worked as a research assistant in Klaas Stephan’s Translational Neuromodeling Unit, received a masters degree in Neural Systems and Computation from ETH Zurich, and completed two simultaneous bachelor’s degrees in Cognitive Science and Mathematics/Computer Science at the University of Osnabrück

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/falklieder/home

Joseph

Joseph Jay Williams www.josephjaywilliams.com Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto Intelligent Adaptive Interventions (IAI) research group