Eugene Santos Jr. Sydney E. Junkins 1887 Professor of Engineering
I build computational models of intent — why people decide what they decide, how those decisions shift in groups, and what a machine has to understand about us before we should trust it.
Reading intent
People rarely say what they actually want. My group builds systems that infer goals from behavior — for analysts, commanders, clinicians, and anyone whose decisions a machine is trying to support.
Earning trust
An AI that cannot explain its reward function is not a teammate. We work on explainability, inverse reinforcement learning, and measuring where human and machine understanding of a task quietly diverge.
Predicting drift
Opinions harden, echo chambers form, insiders turn, populations cross borders during an epidemic. We model the nonlinear, emergent behavior that shows up when individual decisions become collective ones.
Publications
About
Eugene Santos Jr. is the Sydney E. Junkins 1887 Professor of Engineering at the Thayer School of Engineering, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College, and Director of Dartmouth's Master of Engineering program.
His work on artificial intelligence sits where information, cognition, human factors, and mathematics meet. The current focus is computational intent, dynamic human behavior, and reasoning and decision-making — with an emphasis on learning nonlinear and emergent behaviors, and on trust in AI.
The through-line is a practical question: how do we, as individuals and as a society, best use what we know — and how can we work with AI to improve our world for social good? That question lands in three places. In computational social systems: group decision-making, opinion and belief change, socio-cultural attitudes, and social resilience. In user and team modeling: inferring user intentions and needs, closing human–AI intention gaps, and making text and data analytics genuinely useful. And in cybersecurity: insider threat, deception detection, misinformation versus disinformation, and adversarial course-of-action analysis.
He has served on the Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board by appointment of the Secretary of Defense, on the Board of Directors of Sigma Xi, and on the State of Vermont Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. He was a 2019 Public Voices fellow of the OpEd Project and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics from 2008 to 2013. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and of IEEE.