Name: Jacob Steinhardt
E-mail: jsteinhardt@cs
I am a first-year graduate student at Stanford University working with Percy Liang. My undergraduate degree was in mathematics at MIT, where I worked with the Computational Cognitive Science Group and Robot Locomotion Group.
My major academic interest is artificial intelligence --- what tools and concepts do we need to build human-level intelligences, and how can we ensure that such intelligent agents perform the tasks that we want them to? I think the two major obstacles to this are solving difficult statistical inference problems under computational constraints and, relatedly, improving the foundations of decision theory to account for intractable search problems and uncertain or intractable utility functions.
Outside of research, I am a coach for the USA Computing Olympiad and an instructor at the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition. I also like to play Ultimate Frisbee.