Education

Postdoctoral Associate, MIT, 2004-2007

PhD, Northeastern University, 2004

Research Interests

• Human learning and inference, Probabilistic computational models of learning and inference, Machine learning.

Select Publications (for a complete list, see my lab website)

• Bonawitz, E.B., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Goodman, N.D., Spelke, E. & Schulz, L. (2011). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction affects exploration and discovery. Cognition.
• Buchbaum, D., Griffiths, T.L., Gopnik, A. & Shafto, P. (2011). The influence of statistical and pedagogical  cues on children's imitation of causal action sequences. Cognition.
• Shafto, P., Kemp, C., Mansinghka, V. & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2011). A probabilistic model of cross-categorization. Cognition.
• Shafto, P. & Goodman, N. (2008). Teaching games: Statistical sampling assumptions for pedagogical situations. Proceedings of the 30th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
  
• Shafto, P., Kemp, C., Bonawitz, E., Coley, J.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2008). Inductive reasoning about causally transmitted properties. Cognition.  109, 175-192.

• Kemp, C., Shafto, P., Berke, A., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Combining causal and similarity-based reasoning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

• Computational Cognitive Science (Graduate)
• Introduction to computer programming for Psychology majors (Graduate/ Undergraduate)
  

• Statistics (Undergraduate)