معرفی
Sean Dae Houlihan is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College, affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program and the Neukom Computational Science Fellowship. He studies the cognitive mechanisms of social intelligence through probabilistic programming and Bayesian models, aiming to reverse-engineer emotional reasoning in computational terms.
- Education: Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Brain and Cognitive Sciences
His research focuses on social cognition, emphasizing how humans reason about emotions via generative and causal models. His work bridges formal psychological theory with machine emotional intelligence development, leveraging probabilistic programs to explain social reasoning effectiveness and limitations.
The publications highlight trends in computational approaches to social cognition, featuring probabilistic programming, Bayesian inference, and theory-of-mind modeling. These works span interdisciplinary domains including cognitive science, computer science, and neuroscience.
- Glushko Dissertation Prize (CogSci)
- Best Dissertation in Affective Science Award (Society for Affective Science)
- Neukom Computational Science Postdoctoral Fellow
- Dalai Lama Center for Ethics Fellow
Collaborations include working with Dartmouth's Luke Chang, Jonathan Phillips, and Soroush Vosoughi, as well as MIT's Rebecca Saxe, Josh Tenenbaum, and John Gabrieli. He actively participates in academic communities through workshops and conferences, such as the 2025 CogSci workshop on memo probabilistic programming.
