Lab News

2026

July 16, 2026

Upcoming: Make It So Camp, August 24–25 in Tokyo

A two-day working session on directing AI — for practitioners whose expertise isn't software engineering. Co-organized by Joe with Noah Raford and Igor Schwarzmann.

June 25, 2026

TEMPO published at CHIL 2026

Our transformer-based approach to inferring disease progression from cross-sectional data appeared at the Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning.

June 15, 2026

Congratulations to Zhuolun Zhong on three CogSci 2026 papers

Three papers led by Zhuolun Zhong on teaching reinforcement learning agents by intervening on the world were presented at CogSci 2026.

May 15, 2026

Congratulations to Dr. Hongtao Hao!

Hongtao Hao completed his PhD in May 2026, capping it with a run of papers on modeling how diseases progress.

April 1, 2026

The School of Design & Science opens

Chiba Tech's new English-language graduate school — the academic arm of the Henkaku Center — welcomed its first students in April 2026.

March 20, 2026

A paper on L2 shiritori at the Japanese Cognitive Science Society

What 9,891 moves of a Japanese word-chain game reveal about how second-language learners retrieve words under a phonological constraint — with Jumpei Nishikawa and Junya Morita.

March 11, 2026

Panel on AI, health, and disability at the Pro-Justice workshop

Joe joined a panel at "Pro-Justice: Cross-Cultural Approaches to AI Ethics" at the University of Tokyo, co-organized with the University of Cambridge.

February 20, 2026

Talk at the Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference

Joe presented at the 2026 Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference.

January 9, 2026

Invited talk at Shizuoka University

Joe gave an invited talk at Shizuoka University's Informatics Seminar.

2025

December 12, 2025

Asia-Pacific Cognitive Science kickoff meeting

Joe presented at the Asia-Pacific Cognitive Science kickoff at ICCS 2025 and began new collaborations across the region.

December 5, 2025

Two papers at ML4H and the NeurIPS Time Series for Health workshop

Our work on subtype inference and mixed-pathology progression modeling was presented at ML4H 2025 and at the NeurIPS workshop on Learning from Time Series for Health.

October 2, 2025

Co-instructing at the COSMOS summer school

Joe co-instructed at COSMOS 2025, gave a talk on MCMC with People, and led a six-student project on teaching by state intervention.

September 18, 2025

Talk at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry

Joe spoke at NCNP on understanding disease progression using Bayesian event-based models.

June 9, 2025

Joseph Austerweil moves to Chiba Tech in Japan to co-found new graduate school for Design and Science

2024

September 1, 2024

Creating Something Different — category generation in Computational Brain & Behavior

When people invent a new category, they do not just extrapolate from what they know — they build something that contrasts with it.

2023

December 1, 2023

Optimal semantic search throughout adulthood

Jeff Zemla leads a paper in Scientific Reports finding that people search their semantic memory near-optimally across the adult lifespan.

July 31, 2023

Templeton Foundation grant on rumination

Funding from the John Templeton Foundation (through Duke University) to ask whether rumination is necessary or disordered computation.

2022

October 5, 2022

Sabbatical collaboration at RIKEN AIP

While on sabbatical from UW–Madison, Joe spent time as a visiting researcher at RIKEN's Advanced Intelligence Project in Tokyo and gave a talk on human and machine learning.

February 1, 2022

Army Research Office grant on human-machine teaming

A three-year ARO project on human-guided machine learning for futuristic human-machine teaming.

2021

November 1, 2021

Communication in Action published in JEP: General

Mark Ho leads a paper on belief-directed planning and pragmatic action interpretation — how actions become messages.

September 1, 2021

REFRESH published in Psychological Review

A new account of dimensional biases in perceptual similarity and categorization, with Adam Sanborn, Katherine Heller, and Nick Chater.

July 9, 2021

Keynote at the Society for Mathematical Psychology

Joe delivered a keynote on knowledge representation and retrieval at the 2021 meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology.

April 15, 2021

NIH grant on accelerated aging in chronic epilepsy

Joe joins a five-year NIH National Institute on Aging project studying PET/MR correlates of accelerated aging in chronic epilepsy.

2020

August 1, 2020

SNAFU published in Behavior Research Methods

The Semantic Network and Fluency Utility — our open toolbox for estimating semantic networks from fluency data — appeared in Behavior Research Methods.

June 15, 2020

Undergraduate researchers publish in PLOS ONE

Kendra Lange and Elise Hopman led a paper finding no relation between bilingualism and creativity — one of two 2020 journal articles with UW–Madison undergraduate co-authors.

April 24, 2020