Current Members
Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez, Ph.D.
Research Professor and Founding Director of the DDMLab
Coty is a Research Professor in the department of Social and Decision Sciences at CMU. She earned a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from Texas Tech University in 1996.
Coty's research lies at the intersection of Human Behavioral Decision Making and Technology. Her research program is motivated by real-world decision making and by the challenges involved in studying dynamic decision making in the laboratory. Her research is embedded within a theoretical framework that emphasizes the role and development of decisions from experience, the similarity of contexts, and the cognitive abilities of decision makers.
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Palvi Aggarwal, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Palvi Aggarwal completed her Ph.D. in the area of cyber security at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, India. Prior to IIT Mandi, she did Master's in Information Security and Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. She is interested in the analysis of cognitive limitations of memory and recall for hackers and analysts and explore experiential decisions made by hackers and analysts in cyber-security games involving deception. Her areas of interest also include Intrusion Detection Systems, and malware analysis using machine learning and deep learning techniques.
ContactE-mail: palvia@andrew.cmu.edu
Kuldeep Singh, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Kuldeep completed his Ph.D. in Adhoc network security from Computer Science and Engineering Department at Thapar University, India. Prior to this, he completed master’s degree in Information Security from Thapar University, India. His main research interests are trust management, risk analysis, network security and ad-hoc networks.
ContactE-mail: kuldeep2@andrew.cmu.edu
Thuy-Ngoc Nguyen, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Thuy-Ngoc Nguyen received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (UNIBZ), Italy for her research on supporting group decision making process with recommendation techniques. Prior to UNIBZ, she completed her master’s and bachelor’s at Vietnam National University-HoChiMinh City University of Science and HoChiMinh City University of Education, respectively. Her research interests include (group) recommender systems and their applications, human computer interaction, and user modeling.
ContactE-mail: ngocnt@cmu.edu
Farnaz Tehranchi, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Farnaz Tehranchi is joining the lab as a post-doctoral fellow from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research is focused on cognitive computing at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Science. Farnaz is developing an artificial intelligence agent, eyes and hands model by extending visual and motor modules for cognitive architectures. She has received the best poster award at ICCM 2019.
ContactE-mail: ftehranc@andrew.cmu.edu
Erin McCormick
Ph.D. Student
Erin is a doctoral student in Behavioral Decision Research through the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Bachelor of Science in Statistics and Bachelor of Arts in Behavioral Decision Sciences from Brown University in 2020. Her previous research spans the explore-exploit dilemma, trust in humans versus machines, computational neuroscience, and music information retrieval. She is interested in how we can create computational cognitive models of human learning and decision making, and how knowledge gained from these models can be used to improve both human decisions and artificial intelligence.
In the Dynamic Decision Making Lab, she is currently working on a project about individual judgment and decision making in environments where the probability of an event occurring changes over time. In addition to the change detection project, she has worked on studies about the measurement and mitigation of cognitive biases (for example, the bias blind spot), survey methods to assess risk-taking propensity, and cognitive-loaded based lie detection methods. She received a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Harvard University in 2010.
ContactE-mail: enmccorm@andrew.cmu.edu
Erin Bugbee
Ph.D. Student
Erin is a doctoral student in Behavioral Decision Research through the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Bachelor of Science in Statistics and Bachelor of Arts in Behavioral Decision Sciences from Brown University in 2020. Her previous research spans the explore-exploit dilemma, trust in humans versus machines, computational neuroscience, and music information retrieval. She is interested in how we can create computational cognitive models of human learning and decision making, and how knowledge gained from these models can be used to improve both human decisions and artificial intelligence.
ContactE-mail: ebugbee@andrew.cmu.edu
Chase McDonald
Ph.D. Student
Chase is a doctoral student in the Social and Decision Sciences department. His research interests include both empirical and simulated multi-agent systems and their connections to social decision-making, cognition, and intelligence. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Computational Social Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and wrote his undergraduate thesis on the emergence of inter- and intra-group norms under discrimination in multi-agent reinforcement learning systems.
ContactE-mail: chasemcd@andrew.cmu.edu
Don Morrison
Senior Research Programmer
Don received his S.B. in Physics from M.I.T., and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He works on software supporting researchers in the DDMLab and the Psychology Department's FMS Group. He previously worked in the HCII, and before that a variety of software companies. Outside of work, Don is obsessed with change ringing, an obscure art form that arose in Renaissance England and combines music, sport, and group theory.
ContactE-mail: dfm2@cmu.edu
Jeffrey Flagg, M.S.
Lab Manager - Research Associate II
Jeffrey obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include information sharing, online privacy concerns, newcomers to groups, and social exclusion. He has previously managed the Privacy Economics Experiments (PEEX) Lab based at the Heinz College, and is now supporting the management of the DDMLab in its daily operation and development.
ContactE-mail: jflagg@andrew.cmu.edu
Yinuo Du
Masters Student Intern
Yinuo Du is a first year master student of Information Technology Institute (INI), majoring in Information Technology - Mobility. She's interested in the area of Behavioral Cybersecurity. Her work in DDML lab will be exploring methods to improve the effectiveness of honeypots. The first part is to identify modifiable features on honeypots. The second part is to design and implement experiments in HackIT to investigate the best ways to deceive hackers.
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Aditya Gulati
Visiting Scholar
Aditya is a final year masters student at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore and is currently working on human-machine teaming. He is interested in decision making and data science.
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Nhat Phan
Visiting Scholar
Nhat received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics in 2016 at the University of Lorraine, France where he had two-year postdoctoral experience afterward. His research interests include issues related to optimization applied in machine learning and decision making. At the lab, he performs research studies on developing Instance-based Learning models enhanced with reinforcement learning techniques in goal-seeking and collaboration tasks.
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