Postdoctoral Fellow, MARA (Modeling, Abstraction and Reasoning Agents)

This Basis Postdoctoral Fellowship is a collaborative initiative between the Basis Research Institute and Cornell University's Ellis Lab . As a fellow, you will be a key contributor to our ambitious MARA (Modeling, Abstraction, and Reasoning Agent) project, which aims to develop foundational AI technologies that enable systems to actively discover abstract models of the world and reason with them to achieve goals.

Basis is a nonprofit applied AI research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals.

The first is to understand and build intelligence. This means to establish the mathematical principles of what it means to reason, to learn, to make decisions, to understand, and to explain; and to construct software that implements these principles.

The second is to advance society’s ability to solve intractable problems . This means expanding the scale, complexity, and breadth of problems that we can solve today, and even more importantly, accelerating our ability to solve problems in the future.

To achieve these goals, we’re building both a new technological foundation that draws inspiration from how humans reason, and a new kind of collaborative organization that puts human values first.

Kevin Ellis is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Cornell University. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, program synthesis, and the intersection of AI and cognitive science. The Ellis Lab explores how to build AI systems that learn and reason like humans, particularly in areas such as programming by example, world modeling, neural-symbolic integration, and few-shot learning. The group combines techniques from machine learning, program synthesis, probabilistic programming, and cognitive science to develop AI systems that can learn complex tasks from limited data and generalize across domains.