Anand Gopalakrishnan

Bio I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in AI and Cognitive Science at Harvard University working with Yilun Du and Sam Gershman. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at IDSIA working with Jürgen Schmidhuber. Previously, I received my master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and from National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) respectively, with research experiences at Apple, Amazon, University of Waterloo and Indian Institute of Science.

Research Focus My research addresses a fundamental challenge in AI: building systems that can discover and manipulate compositional structure in the way humans do by efficiently learning reusable concepts and combining them flexibly to solve novel problems. While current foundation models exhibit impressive capabilities, they often struggle with systematic generalization, require enormous amounts of data, and lack the kind of structured, compositional understanding of the sensory world that comes naturally to humans.

I draw on principles from human perception and cognition, i.e. how humans perceive objects, form abstractions, reason about relations or causes and effects to build structured world models. My work focuses on developing new methods to discover modular and compositional representations of perceptual data, enabling more sample-efficient learning, better transfer, and stronger out-of-distribution performance. Broadly, I’m driven by the question of how we can build AI systems that learn with the efficiency, flexibility, and generality of human intelligence.

I’m looking for full-time Research Scientist roles in AI/ML. Please reach out if you think I’d be a good fit. Thanks!