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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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
Nhat Phan
Post-Doctoral Fellow
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.
ContactE-mail: dnphan@andrew.cmu.edu
Baptiste Prebot, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Baptiste received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Engineering from the University of Bordeaux, France. His research focused on the real-time evaluation of Team Cognition in military Command and Control using psycho-physiological and behavioral monitoring. As a former UX designer, Baptiste's research interests are oriented towards the teaming of human and autonomous AI's in complex systems and how to facilitate the use of technology to optimise the performance of Human-Autonomous AI teams.
ContactE-mail: Baptiste.Prebot@ensc.fr
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
Yinuo Du
Ph.D. Student
Yinuo Du is a Ph.D. Student student in Societal Computing. She's interested in the area of Behavioral Cybersecurity. Her work in DDMLab will involve Instance-based modeling and cyber simulation platforms like CyberVAN and CybOrg. She'll also be exploring methods to help promote cooperation among defenders.
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Wenjia (Jiajia) Hu
Ph.D. Student
Jiajia is passionate about collective intelligence, and building resilient institutions. She has a BA in cognitive science from Lawrence University and previously worked at the Center for Design Research at Stanford, Social Future Lab at UW, and Block Science. Her current research interest lies in using agent-based modeling to understand how individual behaviors lead to system level phoneme and design interventions to improve collective outcome. She tries to contextualize her research in social computing system design and crypto-economics system design.
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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
Erin McCormick, Ph.D.
Visiting Scholar
Erin recently earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. She has interests in basic research about judgment, decision-making, problem-solving, and emotion, as well as applied work on behavior during emergencies.
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
Ed Matlack
Visiting Scholar
Ed Matlack will be a visiting scholar beginning in October. His research last year in the San Jose State Intelligent Conversational Agents and Neural Networks Lab focused on multi-category sentiment analysis of Covid-19 Twitter feeds and is currently involved in projects for the ICANN Lab for updating economic models in turn taking, intelligent agent based conversations.
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Tony Xi
Masters Student Intern
Tony Xi is a is a first-year master student at the Information Technology Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon University. At the DDMLab, he will be working on the CybORG challenge, an autonomous attackerdefender game, using an Instance Based Learning implementation.
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