To my persistent bemusement, I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Cognitive Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

In the past I was a postdoc in Ed Vul's lab at UCSD, and I escaped with a PhD from Paul Schrater's lab at Minnesota before that.

The only way so many different people can agree about so much they experience in the world is if the fundamental substrate for those experiences is identical. This is clearly true at the level of gross physiology, but cognitive scientists believe that this is also true of more abstract categories of phenomena that underpin experience.

By abstract categories, I mean things like attention, memory, values, emotion, and motivation. These aren't physically observable phenomena, but seem to play important organizing roles in any meaningful analysis that tries to understand the lived experience. The hope of cognitive science is to clarify how and why these phenomena arise, interact, and dissipate.

I share this hope, and am trying to do my bit to help this project along, and to see how insights from this research can be used to improve the ways in which computing systems interact with humans.

Representative publications*

*For a full list, see here.

Over-precise predictions cannot identify good choice models. Computational Brain and Behavior, 2022(preprint)

One and known: Incidental probability judgments from very few samples. Proceedings of CogSci 2021 (pdf)

Modeling procrastination as rational metareasoning about task effort. Proceedings of CogSci 2021 (pdf)

Using conceptual incongruity as a basis for making recommendations. Proceedings of ACM RecSys, 2020 (pdf)

New tab page recommendations strongly concentrate web browsing to familiar sources. Proceedings of ACM WebSci, 2019 (pdf)

A simple model of recognition and recall memory. Proceedings of NIPS 2017 (pdf)

Modeling sampling durations in decisions from experience. Proceedings of Cog Sci 2016 (pdf)

Attention modulates spatial precision in multiple object tracking. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2016 (pdf)

Choosing fast and slow. Proceedings of Cog Sci 2015 (pdf)

Magnitude-sensitive preference formation. Proceedings of NIPS 2014 (pdf)

Frugal preference formation. Proceedings of Cog Sci 2014 (pdf)

Rational inference of relative preferences. Proceedings of NIPS, 2012 (pdf)