I’m Ian, an AI researcher and Computational Neuroscientist at Meta Reality Labs building human-level perceptual models. I’m finishing my PhD at Harvard and MIT in the Labratory for Computational Audition. Previously, I worked with Liberty Hamilton, and have a background in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley, where I worked at the Redwood Center. I’ve also been lucky enough to collaborate with the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Neuroscience.

Research

I’m broadly interested in studying minds and machines to better understand the principles of intelligence, to improve artificial systems and better understand humans.

Auditory attention & “the cocktail party problem”

Human brains can selectively focus on a single voice amid background noises and other talkers, a capacity that has been difficult to reproduce in artificial systems. In our upcoming Nature Human Behavior paper, we examine how human-like auditory attention can emerge in artificial models if they are equipped with biologically-inspired attention mechanisms and trained for the cocktail party problem.