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Frederick Eberhardt

biography

For the next year I am (back) at Carnegie Mellon University with a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation to work on formal methods for causal discovery. For 2013 I have accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities Division at the California Institute of Technology. Until recently, I was an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP) program and the Department of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. Before going to St. Louis I was a McDonnell postdoc at the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. I completed my Ph.D. in the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

research

My research focuses on causal and statistical inference with a particular emphasis on methods of discovery using experiments. Under what circumstances can causal relations be identified and what are the optimal discovery strategies to do so?

The question has a normative and a descriptive side: On the normative side the aim is to develop inference techniques for causal discovery that are optimal and reliable, and to analyze the underlying assumptions. On the descriptive side, humans (and animals?) appear to learn causal relations all the time. Which strategies are employed, and how does this learning compare to a normative theory?

I have also done historical work on the philosophy of Hans Reichenbach, especially on his frequentist interpretation of probability.

education

Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Philosophy, 2007.

M.S., Carnegie Mellon University, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (now Machine Learning Department), School of Computer Science, 2005.

B.Sc. (Philosophy & Mathematics), London School of Economics, 2002.

Picture: arches and tile work in one of the mosques in the Registan in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, 2009