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:
- What techniques enable agents to quickly learn abstract models of the world?
- How can agents flexibly apply what they’ve learned to new problems?
- How can agents identify the important aspects of their decision problem?
- When should agents remember something, and what should they remember?
- How can we design agents so they’ll reliably do what we want, while avoiding unwanted side-effects?
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.