About
I am a fourth-year PhD student at MIT BCS and CSAIL, advised by Josh Tenenbaum and Roger Levy. Previously, I completed my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley with backgrounds in cognitive science, computer science, logic, and philosophy.
My full name is Cedegao Zhang, and I go by Ced.
Email: cedzhang [at] mit [dot] edu
Research overview
I'm interested in the following areas from interdisciplinary perspectives:
- Artificial intelligence
- Reasoning, broadly defined
- Language models, agents, and alignment
- Human-AI relationships
- Computational cognitive science
- Learning, thinking, and problem solving
- Communication and social cognition
- Philosophy
- of AI, language, mind, and science
Questions I like to think about these days: How should we evaluate and improve language models and associated agents/systems such that they can bring more value and joy to people's lives? What are good approaches to integrate LMs with rational computations (programs, Bayes) to make them more efficient, reliable, and aligned? In what sense are humans still better learners, reasoners, and communicators than today's AI? How should we think about the relationships and interactions between humans and AI, both individually and collectively? Where is AI going—how to measure, predict, and steer its societal impacts?
On top of these interests and questions, my long-term goal is to (1) build safe and beneficial AI agents that truly understand (the world, humans, and themselves) with a focus on language, (2) facilitate human-AI symbiosis, and (3) advance the understanding of intelligence (across minds, machines, and social structures).