I research how humans think about what machines know and how machines can think about what humans know. I completed a Ph.D. in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences in May of 2020. I am also a first-generation college graduate from a small hamlet in Southern Idaho with a penchant for the bucolic. Most everyone I know calls me Nik.
My research exists at the intersection of information, communication, computation, and economics. I combine human-subject experiments with computational methods to answer questions like: Can a machine represent the mental states of a human? How do people ‘fill in the blanks’ when a better-informed party–like a conversational AI–strategically withholds information? Is a conversational format of disclosure better than the standard, tabular format? And, how do complex preferences emerge in an adaptive system, that is, a human, machine intelligence, a social group, or a society?