Joshua Peterson

Joshua Peterson comes to BU as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS). His work focuses on the use of large-scale datasets and machine learning to understand and predict human behavior, including decision making, face perception and stereotyping, moral judgment, and visual object classification, among others. Josh’s most notable recent work proposes a revision to seminal theory in behavioral economics. The broader goal of his work is to support the integration of untapped data science tools into the methodological toolkit of behavioral science.

Before joining BU, Josh was a postdoc in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. He completed his PhD in Cognition, Brain, and Behavior in the Department of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR).

Josh's work has been published in top scientific journals including Science, PNAS, and Nature Communications among others, as well as top computer science conferences including ICML and ICCV. He is the recipient of the Computational Modeling Prize in Perception/Action from the Cognitive Science Society, Sister Conference Best Paper at IJCAI, and winner of the 2018 Choice Prediction Competition. Learn more.