Today's rapid advances in artificial intelligence present an unprecedented opportunity to augment the human mind with the help of technology. Our goal is to leverage insights from cognitive science to develop technologies that help humanity overcome its cognitive limitations and enable people to make better decisions, learn faster, become more productive, and achieve their goals.

We combine insights from psychology with methods from artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to develop digital assistants that help people achieve their goals. We refer to such technologies as cognitive prostheses. 

Our basic idea for leveraging AI to help people make better decisions is to align each action's immediate reward with its long-term value to make good decisions easier []. We have developed a mathematical framework for designing incentive structures that can be used to guarantee that the rewards won't accidentally incentivize counter-productive behaviors and a computational method for computing incentives that make it as easy as possible for people to choose the course of action that is best in the long run. We are working on instantiating this approach in an intelligent productivity system that helps people plan their days, weeks, and months by computing optimal hierarchical plans and incentivizing the user's tasks and potential short-term goals accordingly. Initial results suggest that this is a promising approach to helping people prioritize their most important tasks and overcome procrastination []. We are currently scaling up this approach [] and integrating it into a digital companion that helps people achieve their goals. In a complementary project, we applied this approach to develop a mathematical principle for the gamification of behavior change []. In another project, we successfully applied this approach to incentivize self-directed learning [].

We combine these computational approaches with psychological theory to guide people towards socially beneficial goals [] and help them overcome psychological obstacles, such as self-defeating thoughts and emotions [].