Dae Houlihan

Dae studies the cognitive mechanisms of social intelligence. Human social cognition shows remarkable sophistication and flexibility, as well as dramatic errors and limitations. Dae's research investigates how social cognition works, when it is effective, and what causes it to fail. He uses probabilistic programs to model how people reason about social situations, plan interactions, and interpret each others' emotional expressions. His work aims to reverse-engineer the mechanisms of social cognition in computational terms that are useful both for understanding the human mind and for building machines with human-like emotional intelligence. He is a Fellow of The Neukom Institute for Computational Science.