Speaker: Keyon Vafa

Institution: Harvard Data Science Initiative

Date: 14:00 BST, 27th August, 2025

Talk Title: Behavioral Machine Learning

Abstract: Abstract will be provided once available.

Bio: Keyon Vafa is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, affiliated with the Harvard Data Science Initiative. His research focuses on behavioral machine learning, where he develops tools to evaluate how AI models understand the world with the goal of fostering shared understanding between models and people. He is also an affiliate of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Vafa earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University in 2023, where he was advised by David Blei. During his doctoral studies, he was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Cheung-Kong Innovation Doctoral Fellowship, and he received the Morton B. Friedman Memorial Prize for excellence in engineering upon graduation.