Adam Davies

À propos

Hi there! 👋 I’m Adam, a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft’s IDEAS Research team, and recently (May 2026) graduated from UIUC (opens in new tab) with my PhD in CS (opens in new tab).

I study how AI models “think”, working at the intersection of NLP, (mechanistic) interpretability, cognitive science, OOD generalization, and causal machine learning to understand internal representations and processes that drive AI behaviors. My research vision is to help build the foundations of a cognitive science of AI (opens in new tab), studying how foundation models like LLMs learn, represent, and process information. My work (opens in new tab) focuses on how we can interpret and control the features learned and leveraged by these models, including how they are used in performing various tasks, and how to apply such knowledge/methods to predict and improve models’ generalization to novel contexts.