Joseph Jay Williams will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in July 2018. His research agenda is to create intelligent self-improving systems that conduct dynamic experiments to discover how to optimize and personalize technology, helping people learn new concepts and change habitual behavior. This requires using computational cognitive science and Bayesian statistics to bridge human-computer interaction with machine learning, with applications to education and health behavior change.
Joseph is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore’s School of Computing, department of Information Systems & Analytics, and Translational Research Technologies Lead at the Institute for the Application of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology. He was Research Fellow at Harvard’s Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, and a member of the Intelligent Interactive Systems Group in Computer Science. He completed a postdoc at Stanford University in the Graduate School of Education in Summer 2014, working with the Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning and the Open Learning Initiative. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Computational Cognitive Science, where he applied Bayesian statistics and machine learning to model how people learn and reason. He received his B.Sc. from University of Toronto in Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, and is originally from Trinidad and Tobago. More information about his research and papers is at www.josephjaywilliams.com.
Joseph is recruiting postdocs and graduate students to start on or after July 2018.