Joshua Peterson Joins BU as Assistant Professor in CDS

Boston University Joshua PetersonJoshua Peterson has joined the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) as a tenure-track assistant professor. He comes to Boston University (BU) from Princeton University, where he completed his postdoc in the Department of Computer Science.

“We are so pleased to welcome Joshua Peterson to CDS,” said Professor Azer Bestavros, the Associate Provost for CDS. “He is an accomplished researcher who is well-published in some of the best scientific outlets and whose scholarship at the nexus of psychology and data science is hugely impactful for a number of disciplines as it helps us develop, understand, and improve our theories of human behavior. His expertise and capacity for truly interdisciplinary research will be huge assets for CDS and for our faculty and students.”

Peterson earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also joined the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR). His work includes a focus on predicting human behavior by using large datasets and machine learning.

“I’m extremely excited to be joining a place like CDS that is way ahead of the game on embracing data science and interdisciplinary work,” he said. “I’m also excited to introduce classic problems from behavioral science to a new generation of data-competent students who will have opportunities to make new kinds of contributions to the field.”

Peterson is fascinated by data’s potential to help explain human behavior. “Despite having massively more human-generated data than at any other point in history, the application of data science to understand human behavior is still largely unexplored. This means that there's a huge frontier of work to be done in uncovering how data science can be applied to domains like psychology and behavioral economics,” he said.

Peterson recognizes the value of the interdisciplinary approach embraced by CDS. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, he designed his own program in cognitive science, combining computer science and psychology. It has since become a permanent major at the school.