Noah Goodman
Stanford University
Stories from CoCoLab: Probabilistic programs, cognitive modeling, and smart web pages

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Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) enable formal, high-level specification of probabilistic models and exploration of universal inference strategies. This talk will describe probabilistic programming languages, via a new Javascript-based language call WebPPL. Additionally, a few applications to modeling human language understanding, and to constructing smart web pages.

Noah D. Goodman is Assistant Professor of Psychology, Linguistics (by courtesy), and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He studies the computational basis of human thought, merging behavioral experiments with formal methods from statistics and programming languages. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. In 2005 he entered cognitive science, working as Postdoc and Research Scientist at MIT. In 2010 he moved to Stanford where he runs the Computation and Cognition Lab. CoCoLab studies higher-level human cognition including language understanding, social reasoning, and concept learning; the lab also works on applications of these ideas and enabling technologies such as probabilistic programming languages.