I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Helmholtz Munich. Before that I was a postdoctoral research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, working on the Major Transitions in the Evolution of Cognition project.
My current research focuses on building cognitively-inspired evaluations of Artificial Intelligence (AI), so that we can better understand what they are capable of, what they still cannot do, and whether they are cognitive in any meaningful sense. This work informs both how we should interpret and govern the safety of novel systems, as well as how we can build more robust AI systems that behave like humans and other animals. You can see my research publications here.
I received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge in 2024, supervised by Dr Lucy Cheke and Dr Marta Halina and examined by Prof. Nicola Clayton and Prof. Cameron Buckner. Before that, I received an MPhil in Biological Sciences (Psychology), supervised by Dr Lucy Cheke and Dr Marta Halina, and a BA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, both from the University of Cambridge.
I want to better understand cognition and behaviour, and I believe that to do so, we must use the diverse tools of the cognitive sciences. My research is firmly interdisciplinary, and I have so far drawn on animal psychology, developmental psychology, psychometrics, the philosophy of science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, and linguistics to try to better measure and theorise about cognition in diverse species, and recreate it artificially.
People call me Kozzy for short.
Email me: kv301 [little monkey] srcf [dot] net