Irina Rabkina : Research


Research Past, Present, and Future

I am interested in the intersection of cognitive science and artifical intelligence. The human mind is an incredible thing: we learn quickly and continuously, while being able to apply our knowledge to novel challenges. We are also uniquely good at social reasoning--thinking about and interacting with others. That is the focus of my current research. I have developed the Analogical Theory of Mind (AToM) model, which models theory of mind reasoning and development (an important aspect of social reasoning). Using this model, I have made psychologically-relevant predictions. Now, I am applying the same mechanisms involved in AToM to virtual agents thinking about other agents (both virtual and human) with the goal of creating AIs that interact with others in ways tha we perceive to be natural and penetrable.

As a master's student, I worked with Dr. Mark Albert on a front-end activity recognition software. More information can be found on Dr. Albert's site, and the codebase can be found here.

As an undergraduate, I did research at the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. My undergraduate thesis, which I presented as a poster at the Association for Psychological Science in 2016, was titled "Examining the Intersection of the Cognitive Advantages and Disadvantages of the Bilingual Brain". My advisor was Timothy Justus (site).

Publications, Posters, and Presentations

For the most up-to-date citations to my work, check out my Google Scholar profile .

Selected Publications

Rabkina, I., Nakos, C., & Forbus, K. D. (2019) Children’s Sentential Complement Use Leads the Theory of Mind Development Period: Evidence from the CHILDES Corpus. Proceedings of the 41st Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Montreal, Canada.
Chen, K., Rabkina, I., McLure M. D., & Forbus, K. D. (2019) Human-like Sketch Object Recognition via Analogical Learning. Proceedings AAAI 2019, Honolulu, HI.
Rabkina, I., McFate, C., & Forbus, K. D. (2018) Bootstrapping from Language in the Analogical Theory of Mind Model. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Madison, WI.
Forbus, K. D., Hinrichs, T., & Rabkina, I. (2018). Building Analogy Systems: Some Lessons Learned. Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Stanford, CA.
Forbus, K. D., Liang, C., & Rabkina, I. (2017). Representation and Computation in Cognitive Models. Topics in Cognitive Science, 9(3), 694-718.
Rabkina, I., McFate, C., Forbus, K. D., & Hoyos, C. (2017) Towards a Computational Analogical Theory of Mind. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society London, England.