Benjamin C. Jantzen

I am an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech. I’m interested in the contents and character of the natural world and how we come to know it. Mostly this amounts to a concern with questions about inference and language in science: How do we infer successful theories from limited observations of the world? To what extent can this be achieved by a machine? How and to what do scientific terms refer?

My current research is focused on building new kinds of algorithms for automated scientific discovery. In other words, a sort of robot scientist. Doing so is way of testing answers to questions about scientific inference: working algorithms provide the most concrete answers possible about how various sorts of induction are possible. Doing so is also a way of getting at questions of meaning and reference in scientific theory.