Kushin Mukherjee

kmukherjee2 at wisc dot edu

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I am a fifth year Psychology PhD student at UW-Madison. My primary interest is in the nature of visual concepts. How are they learned? How are they structured? Can machines be taught these concepts? I believe the act of communication can shed much light on the answers to these questions, and so I study how we use drawings and information visualizations to convey our knowledge of the world to each other.

I'm based in the Knowledge and Concepts Lab, Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab, and Social Interaction Lab at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. I've also been very fortunate to be a Kohler Fellow at WID, which has let me think about how science and art can intersect to give rise to fun new ideas. I believe we do our best science when working collaboratively as groups and so I can often be found in virtual meeting rooms with members of the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford, Visual Intelligence and Technological Advances Lab at York, and Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Lab at Princeton.

I grew up in Kolkata, India, a bustling city with hot summers and torrential monsoons. Noticing a distinct lack of snow in my climate collection, I moved to upstate New York, where I received my BA in Cognitive Science and Japanese from Vassar College. While at Vassar, I was advised by Ken Livingston and Josh de Leeuw. I also spent a summer at the Computation and Cognition Lab at Stanford as a CSLI intern, working with Judy Fan and Robert Hawkins (and continue to today!).

news

Mar 5, 2024 Two papers accepted to the ICLR 2024 Workshop on Representational Alignment! Stay tuned for preprints!
Feb 1, 2024 I will be interning at Apple Machine Learning Research, Cambridge this summer! Excited to be back on the east coast for a bit~
Oct 6, 2023 Our paper SEVA: Leveraging sketches to evaluate alignment between human and machine visual abstraction was accepted to the NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks track! See publications for more!
Oct 6, 2023 Excited that our paper Conceptual structure coheres in human cognition but not in large language models was accepted to EMNLP 2023! Preprint forthcoming!
Aug 1, 2023 Our paper Leveraging Artificial Neural Networks to Enhance Diagnostic Efficiency in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Study on Facial Emotion Recognition was accepted for an oral at CCN 2023! Looking forward to seeing everyone in England!