About

I am in the Ph.D. program at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Ted Gibson and Josh Tenenbaum. I am interested in how people use probabilistic inference to acquire and process interestingly structured information. I am also interested in information theory, theory of computation, philosophy of mind, and symbolic dynamics.

I am also one of the organizers for the Boston Society of Cognitive Science. We sponsor monthy lectures and discussions about foundational issues in cognitive science.

Journal papers

• Symbolic Dynamics on Free Groups. Steven T. Piantadosi. Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems - Series A. 20(3) : 725-738. 2007.
• Uniform information density in discourse: a cross-corpus analysis of syntactic and lexical predictability. Steven T. Piantadosi and Edward Gibson. (in prep).

Conference Papers

• The communicative lexicon hypothesis. Steven T. Piantadosi, Harry Tily, Ted Gibson. Cogsci 2009. [Note: this contains some but not all of the work presented at CUNY 2009]
• A Bayesian Model of the Acquisition of Compositional Semantics. Steven T. Piantadosi, Noah D. Goodman, Benjamin A. Ellis, Joshua B. Tenenbaum. Cogsci 2008.

Unpublished papers:

• Computation with Opaque Representation. 2006. (postscript)
• Symbolic Dynamics on Free Groups (Senior Honors Thesis). 2006. (pdf)

Previous research projects/groups:

• Symbolic Dynamics with Karl Petersen at UNC Chapel Hill. Click to read my honors thesis.
• Spatial Epsilon Machine Soup with Jim Crutchfield at The Santa Fe Institute.
• Nanoscale Science Research Group at UNC Chapel Hill.
• Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center with Bruce Bochner.