Hanna M. Dettki

I am a Master’s student in Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen advised by Prof. Charley Wu and Prof. Brenden Lake. I previously earned a Master’s in Psychology at New York University (NYU) on a Fulbright scholarship (2025) advised by Prof. Brenden Lake and Prof. Bob Rehder. I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Tübingen, Germany (2022) with semesters abroad in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and my Bachelor’s thesis on “Probabilistic Modeling of Infectious Disease Dynamics” was advised by Prof. Philipp Hennig.

Currently, I am a summer intern at the Center for Computational Neuroscience of the Flatiron Institute (CCN) in New York City. Advised by Prof. Alex Williams, my work focuses on developing a scalable Bayesian machine learning framework to support adaptive trial placement in psychophysical experiments to better understand human (color) perception. I am broadly interested in the computational ingredients of intelligence — both human and artificial. My current thesis research focuses on causal reasoning in humans and large language models (LLMs), with a recent publication examining how LLMs compare to human causal inference patterns and biases. More broadly, I’m interested in using machine learning methods to deepen our understanding of human cognition, while drawing on insights from psychology to inform the development of more reliable AI systems that more closely mirror human expectations.

Looking ahead, I’m particularly excited about the role of uncertainty quantification in making AI systems more robust and trustworthy. I believe that enabling AI systems to know what they don’t know — and to communicate this uncertainty appropriately — will be crucial for deploying them safely in real-world scenarios. I’m also interested in exploring how insights from human cognition can inform the development of more adaptive agentic AI systems that can pursue goals autonomously while learning efficiently from limited data and generalizing better to new situations.

In my free time, I enjoy travelling by bicycle, board games, and playing any sports that involves a ball.