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.

I like to describe my research vision in terms of the “cognitive neuropsychology of AI” – where cognitive scientists like psychologists or neuroscientists study how intelligent systems like the minds/brains of humans and other intelligent animals learn, represent, and process information, I am focused on performing similar analysis with respect to foundation models like LLMs.

My work intersects with topics including natural language processing, (mechanistic) interpretability, cognitive science, distribution-shift robustness, 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.