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Hi there, I'm Cam Allen

I'm a postdoc studying AI with Stuart Russell at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. In spring 2024, I was also a lecturer for CS 188, Berkeley's upper-division artificial intelligence course. Previously, I completed my PhD at Brown University, advised by George Konidaris.

I am interested in the foundations of intelligence—the computations that enable agency, learning, planning, abstraction, and interaction. My research is focused on trying to answer some of the following questions:

  1. How can agents construct appropriate models of their decision problem?
  2. How should agents form representations of what they know?
  3. When do agents need memory, and what should they remember?
  4. How can agents use abstraction to shift their reference frames?
  5. How might we align the reference frames of different agents?
  6. What makes an agent self-aware? How can it notice its own reference frame?
  7. Is there a link between self-awareness and experience? Experience and meaning?
  8. How can we build agents that help us have more meaningful and beautiful experiences?

I build AI systems as a way to study these core aspects of intelligence, in the hopes that they will allow us to better understand ourselves and our world, and ultimately to improve both.


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