Tao Gao

Tao Gao is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Communication and Department of Statistics at UCLA. His research focuses on human social perception and cognition, aiming to reverse-engineer human social commonsense to inform AI development. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Yale University, followed by postdoctoral work at MIT's Center for Brain, Mind, and Machine, and prior roles at GE Global Research.

Education: Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (Yale University), Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT's CBMM, and Research Scientist at GE Global Research.

Research Interests: Human animacy perception, theory of mind, AI commonsense, and human-AI collaboration. His interdisciplinary work combines cognitive science, AI, robotics, and computer vision to model how humans perceive intentions, beliefs, and social concepts, and translate these insights into computational systems.

Recent Articles: Focus on intentional commitment, cooperative communication, animacy perception, and multi-agent systems. His work explores how social cognition principles can improve AI's trustworthiness and collaboration with humans.

Advising & Grants: No student advisees listed; active in research labs and collaborations with industry/academia. Current projects emphasize cognitive-inspired AI and socially intelligent robots.

Labs/Teams: Previously affiliated with GE's Computer Vision and Machine Learning labs. At UCLA, contributes to interdisciplinary efforts in communication and statistical AI.