about me

Hello there! 👋 My name is Adam Davies, and I’m a CS PhD candidate in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at UIUC. This summer (2025), I’m also a research intern at Microsoft Research.

My research vision is to help build the foundations of a cognitive science of AI – that is: where cognitive scientists like psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, or philosophers of mind study how intelligent systems like the minds/brains of humans (and other intelligent animals) learn, represent, and process information, I am focused on performing analogous study with respect to foundation models like LLMs.

My work intersects primarily with natural language processing, (mechanistic) interpretability, cognitive science, and OOD generalization, with a secondary focus on causal machine learning, synthetic data, multimodal representation learning, and computational social science.

where’s Adam?

at MSR (Summer 2025): I’m working with the Neurocompositional AI team in the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research.

at UIUC: I’m co-advised by Professors ChengXiang Zhai and Julia Hockenmaier, and I work as a research assistant with the INVITE institute. I also collaborate frequently with the Torr Vision Group at the University of Oxford.