Kincaid MacDonald

Graduate Student

Kincaid McDonald is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science advised by Peter Henderson. He works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and mathematics – endeavoring to “think about thinking” with interdisciplinary inspiration and rigor. Some of his questions include: What separates passive knowledge from active, agentic intelligence? How do large language models store facts and manipulate them with given values? How can mathematical ideas from Riemannian (and Grothendiecken) geometry improve models’ knowledge representations and reasoning capabilities?

Before coming to Princeton, Kincaid studied with Smita Krishnaswamy and Ian Adelstein at Yale, researching topics in geometric deep learning including graph curvature, learnable scattering transforms, and Riemannian metric learning.

MacDonald can be reached at kincaid@princeton.edu, 312 Sherrerd Hall.