About

I am a third-year PhD student at the Department of Brain and Cognitve Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advised by Josh Tenenbaum and Roger Levy. Previously, I completed my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley with backgrounds in cognitive science, computer science, logic, and philosophy.

My full name is Cedegao Zhang, and I go by Ced.

Email: cedzhang [at] mit [dot] edu

News

Research overview

I am broadly interested in studying the following areas from interdisciplinary perspectives:

Questions I like to think about these days: What are the strengths and limitations of LLMs? What are good approaches to combine LLMs and symbolic techniques? In what sense are humans better learners, reasoners, and communicators than state-of-the-art AI? What are world models? Is there a Language of Thought, and what might that look like?

On top of these interests and questions, my long-term reaserach goal is to (1) build general AI systems in a human-inspired and human-compatible way with a focus on language, and (2) advance the understanding of intelligence through theories and models.