At the invitation of the Human Cognition Laboratory, and with a presentation by Dr. Ana Paula Soares, Dr. Rui Mata brings us the conference titled "The Promise of Large Language Models for the Psychological Sciences" on September 11th, Monday at 11:30 AM in the EPsi Amphitheater.
Bio
Rui Mata is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Basel, Switzerland, where he heads the Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences. He is a also a member of the Committee for Risk Research and Risk Perception of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Germany. Rui Mata was born 1979 in Lisbon, Portugal. He received a Licenciatura in Psychology from the University of Lisbon in 2002 and then moved to Germany to became a predoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Research School LIFE, working at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin.He received a doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2006. Between 2006 and 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Portugal (University of Lisbon), the United States of America (University of Michigan, Stanford University), and Switzerland (University of Basel). In 2012, he took up a position as senior scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. In 2014, Rui returned to Switzerland to take up a position as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel.
Resume
Advances in machine learning have produced large language models (LLMs) that can interpret and generate large amounts of text. LLMs have tremendous potential as tools for the psychological sciences. This talk will showcase two applications of such models, specifically, first, how LLMs can be used to help clarify the conceptual network of constructs and linguistic measures in psychology, and, second, predict human attitudes and behaviour. Finally, the talk will discuss limitations of LLMs and how the psychological sciences can be used to inform their future development.
