Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Joshua Brett Tenenbaum (Josh Tenenbaum) is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to mathematical psychology and Bayesian cognitive science. According to the MacArthur Foundation, which named him a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, "Tenenbaum is one of the first to develop and apply probabilistic and statistical modeling to the study of human learning, reasoning, and perception, and to show how these models can explain a fundamental challenge of cognition: how our minds understand so much from so little, so quickly." and his father is Internet commerce pioneer Jay Martin Tenenbaum.

His research direction was strongly influenced by his parents' interest in teaching and learning, and later by interactions with cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard, during his years at Yale.

Tenenbaum's recent research includes teaching AI systems to imitate human face-recognition methods and programming AI to understand cause and effect.

Publications

Tenenbaum has a list of his publications on his MIT web page and on Google Scholar.