Stanford Data Science Distinguished Lecture with Tom Griffiths

Stanford Data Science is pleased to host our Winter Distinguished Lecture on February 5th, 2025. Our speaker is Tom Griffiths, Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture in the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University.

Tom Griffiths' talk is titled: Using machine learning and psychology to predict and understand human decisions

We welcome you to join us at 6:30pm for a dinner reception and an opportunity to engage with others in the Stanford Data Science community, followed by the lecture at 7:30pm.

Abstract

Machine learning methods provide increasingly powerful tools for generating predictions about human behavior. However, simply using off-the-shelf methods to generate predictions potentially misses opportunities to benefit from and contribute to the psychological literature. In this talk, Tom Griffiths will discuss three ways in which theory and data can interact through machine learning: using theories to pretrain machine learning models; using theories to constrain machine learning models; and using unconstrained machine learning models to critique explanatory theories. Tom will illustrate these cases with examples from the study of human decision-making, discussing risky choice, moral judgments, behavioral game theory, and open-ended decision-making, and also highlight some recent work using large language models to predict human decisions.

About the Distinguished Lectures

Stanford Data Science brings world-class researchers to campus every quarter in our Distinguished Lecture series. These speakers build and apply modern data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques and tools to accelerate data-driven discoveries across all fields.

Lectures are free for the whole community and include an informal reception beforehand. Spend an evening with creative thought leaders on the Stanford campus.

Past lecture recordings are available on our .

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