Prof. Josh Tenenbaum has been awarded the Howard Crosby Warren Medal, from the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP), for his pioneering and seminal contributions to our understanding of human knowledge development and human reasoning using probabilistic models of cognition.

Oral presentation of the SEP award:

 Josh Tenenbaum is one of the pioneers and world's major contributors to probabilistic models of cognition. His research has straddled computer science and cognitive science, exploring key questions at the heart of both human and machine learning: what makes people so smart, and how we can make computers smarter.

During his career, Tenenbaum has built an extremely strong foundation that tacklesthe deep question of what the formal properties of human intelligence might be: what allows us to make inferences in diverse domains, to form theories about the world, and to effortlessly link perception and action. His answer is thatall of these abilities depend on the capacity to form rich, structured representations, and to explore the implications of those representations by simulating the outcomes of causal processes using probabilistic generative models.

Over the last five years, Tenenbaum has developed the mathematical tools to turn these ideas into a psychologically grounded theory of cognition. His theory is supported by many compelling empirical findings that show how it can predict complex aspects of human behaviorincluding causal, perceptual, and linguistic reasoning.

Tenenbaum's ideas have been tremendously influential and they have spread across the entire field of cognitive science. He has developed a generaltheoretical perspective and a powerful set of modeling tools that will have a long lasting effect on the intellectual and practical landscape of cognitive psychology.