Kelsey Allen

Faculty Member

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Assistant Professor, Computer Science, University of British Columbia

Kelsey is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. Prior to this, she spent 4 years working as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. She received her PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and her BSc from the University of British Columbia in Physics. Her work has received awards including the international Glushko prize for best dissertation in cognitive science, a best paper award from Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS), and an NSERC PhD fellowship. Spanning robotics, machine learning, and cognitive science, her work aims to elucidate the mechanisms that give rise to adaptive and efficient learning, especially in the domains of decision-making and reasoning.

Research Interests

  •  Cognitive AI
  •  Machine Learning
  •  Robotics & Decision-making
  •  World Models
  •  Vision-language foundation models
  •  Commonsense reasoning

Highlights

  • Glushko dissertation prize in Cognitive Science 
  •  Robotics: Science and Systems best paper award
  •  NSERC PGS-M

Publications

Using games to understand the mind

Kelsey Allen and Franziska Brandle and Matthew Botvinick and Judith E Fan and Samuel J Gershman and Alison Gopnik and Thomas L Griffiths and Joshua K Hartshorne and Tobias U Hauser and Mark K Ho and Joshua R de Leeuw and Wei Ji Ma and Kou Murayama and Jonathan D Nelson and Bas van Opheusden and Thomas Pouncy and Janet Rafner and Iyad Rahwan and Robb B Rutledge and Jacob Sherson and Ozgur Simsek and Hugo Spiers and Christopher Summerfield and Mirko Thalmann and Natalia Velez and Andrew J Watrous and Joshua B Tenenbaum and Eric Schulz

2024

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