About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colby College and affiliated faculty at the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence. My research is in philosophy of mind, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. One strand of my work focuses on internal representations that shape the behavior of biological and artificial systems. Another focuses on how embodiment and expressive movement shape cognition, looking especially at dance. I have also been developing techniques for computational analysis of human movement, using pose estimation data and machine learning. At Colby, I teach courses in philosophy of mind, AI, cognitive science, and dance. Before joining the Colby faculty, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship in computational neuroscience at UPenn, where I also received my PhD in Philosophy, and I hold a JD from Yale Law School.

Research



Selected Publications

Rethinking Artificial General Intelligence: Beyond Anthropomorphism (Invited chapter for Introducing Philosophy of Mind, Today, Routledge),
-- 2026 (forthcoming)

Use and Usability: Concepts of Representation in Philosophy, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science (with Richard Lange, Andrew Richmond, Rosa Cao, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Odelia Schwartz and Xaq Pitkow),
-- 2026 Neurons, Behavior, Data Analysis, and Theory

Understanding Complexity Through Affordances (with Sonia Roberts),
-- 2025 Minds and Machines

Computational kinematics of dance: distinguishing Hip Hop genres (with Tony Liu, Jordan Matelsky, Felipe Parodi, Brett Mensh, John Krakauer and Konrad Kording),
-- 2024 Frontiers in Human Robotics and AI

Commentary on Favela and Machery, "Investigating the concept of representation in neural and psychological sciences
-- 2023 The Brains Blog

Three Aspects of Representation in Neuroscience (with Ben Lansdell and Konrad Kording),
-- 2022 Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Creativity in AI Dance Art
-- 2022 International Conference on Computational Creativity

Natural information, factivity and nomicity
-- 2021 Biology and Philosophy

Referee Report of (hypothetical) Philosophy-101 Textbook, by Professor Unspecified
-- 2021 Teaching Philosophy
   Spanish Translation by Fredy H.P. Galindo
   -- 2023 Cuestiones Filosophia

Teaching

I strive to empower my students to let their curiosity and passion drive their education. My courses challenge students to consider a topic from multiple disciplinary and cultural perspectives, and I incorporate hands-on interaction with emerging technologies, helping to build broadly applicable skills and knowledge.

Courses Taught

AI and Human Values
Central Philosophical Issues: Mind, Body and Machine
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Dance
Philosophy of Emotion
Philosophy of Visual Perception
Bodes and Power
Ethics

CV

You can view my CV below or download the PDF here.

For inquiries about consulting, see this page.



About Now

I'm on sabbatical! Glad for the chance to push forward a few research projects and take a brief step back from teaching.

Proofs just arrived for "Rethinking AGI: Beyond Anthropomorphism," a chapter for a Routledge coursebook in philosophy of mind. And now out in Neurons, Behavior, Data Analysis, and Theory, the results of a long-running collaboration across philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science and computer science on how "use and usability" factor into these fields' concepts of representation.

I'm also closing in on a submission ready version of a paper on dance-cognition -- an idea that has been kicking around in some form for years. It will offer an account of distinct kinds of thinking that dancers rely on, speaking simultaneously to questions in dance scholarship and questions about embodied and enactive cognition, grounded mainly in Black social dance styles.

In parallel with the theoretical work, I'm continuing to develop computational analyses of dance and movement. Using the markerless motion capture system I set up at Colby, I recorded some dancers performing a short piece I choreographed in the Spring. I'm investigating the data, working toward some new perspectives on movement learning and style -- you can get a first look below.

Dance Movement Feature Comparison

Students learned a ~36 count phrase. We visualize and plot movement features in the student (green) as compared to the choreographer (grey, re-scaled to the student's skeleton). For each comparison, the clip ends with a ¼-speed replay of the roughest section for the depicted feature(s).

Timing. The body stays green when she is locked in with the choreographer, turns red when she runs late and blue when she runs early. Whoever is ahead leaves brief comet-trails behind their joints — the path the other dancer hasn't caught up to yet.
Level & travel. The two dots on the left rise and fall with each dancer's level — gray for the choreographer, green for the student — showing who gets low, and when. The bar at the bottom lights up during traveling moves: red means the student covers less floor than the choreography asks, blue means more.
Pose. The student's pose shades red when her joint angles stray furthest from the choreographer's. The red marks above the timeline flag the hardest passages, labeled by their count in the music. Choreographer is recentered at the student's position each frame, abstracting away global position.
Facing. The lower dial shows which way each body faces; the upper dial does the same for the head. The green arm is the student's direction and the arc sweeps to the choreographer's — faint gray when they agree, shading to red as the gap widens, as on a turn started late or cut short.
Footwork. A close-up comparison of legs and feet. Whenever a knee or foot drifts too far, a red arrow points from the student's joint toward the choreographer's. Choreographer is recentered at the student's position each frame, abstracting away global position.
Expansion. The faint gray shell is the choreographer's shape — how far she reaches out from her own center — and the student's arrows share that center, poking past the shell when she opens out further and falling inside it when she stays gathered. Both are measured relative to each dancer's own body size. The bar at the right tracks the gap: red and up when the student is more expanded, blue and down when less.