# VICTOR BTESH

vbtesh9@gmail.com | [Website](https://vbtesh.github.io) | [GitHub](https://github.com/Vbtesh) | [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Zl8n9jEAAAAJ&hl=en)

Last updated: 05-05-2026

## RESEARCH INTEREST

### Computational social cognition
Status and hierarchy, Social motivations, Relationships, Inverse planning, Theory of Mind

### Causal cognition
Causal structure learning, Controlling dynamical systems

### Statistics and Methodology
Computational modeling, Bayesian methods, reinforcement learning.

## RESEARCH POSITIONS AND AFFILIATIONS

### Visiting Researcher | April - May 2025
Department of Psychology, New York University

### Visiting Researcher at the Causality in Cognition Lab | March - April 2025
Psychology Department, Stanford University

### Enrichment Scholar | 2023 - 2024
The Alan Turing Institute, London

### Visiting Researcher at the Computational Cognitive Science lab | March - June 2023
Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh

## EDUCATION

### Experimental Psychology Ph.D., University College London | 2020 -

Field: Computational social cognition

Topic: [TBD]

Supervisors: Prof. David Lagnado and Prof. Maarten Speekenbrink.

### MSc Psychological Sciences, University College London | 2019 - 2020

Grade: 81.96, Distinction, Dean's List.

Thesis (84, Distinction, Prize for highest mark): Domain-specific priors in dynamic causal learning.
    
Thesis advisor: Prof. David Lagnado.

### MSc Organisational and Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science | 2017 - 2018
Grade: 68, Merit.

Thesis (78, Distinction): From Expert Systems to Deep Learning: A study of hype cycles and representations of AI in the French public sphere, 1980-2018.

Thesis advisor: Prof. Martin W. Bauer.

### BA and MSc in Management, Ieseg School of Management | 2011 - 2017
Organisational psychology and human resources management. (15.5/20)

Thesis (18/20): Occupational identification of business school students in France via self-verification and core self-evaluations.

Thesis advisor: Dr. Amanda Schantz.

## PUBLICATIONS

Btesh, V., Wu S., & Gerstenberg, T. (2026). Action understanding with Presentational Goals. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 48

Btesh, V. & Ho M. (2026). Let's be friends! People work together even when there is no incentive to do so. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 48

Horner, M., Btesh, V., Moore A., & Quillien, T. (2026). When giving more makes you look worse: paradoxical inferences in a Bayesian model of social evaluation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 48

Btesh, V., Lagnado, D., & Gerstenberg, T. (2025). Taking others for granted: balancing personal and presentational goals in action selection. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47 [See online](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23d145sd)

Btesh, V., Bramley, N. R., Speekenbrink, M., & Lagnado, D. A. (2026). Less is more: Local focus in continuous time causal learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 52(1), 55–80. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001451

Btesh, V., Bramley, N. R., Fränken, J.-P., Speekenbrink, M., & Lagnado, D. A. (2023). Variational inference in dynamical active causal learning. In Proceedings of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting 2023. [See online](https://www.bramleylab.ppls.ed.ac.uk/publication/2023-01-01_btesh2023ccn/)

Btesh, V., Bramley, N. R., Speekenbrink, M., & Lagnado, D. A. (2023). Swipe and hold: Composing interventions in continuous time causal learning. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 45). [See online](https://escholarship.org/content/qt3sv1d2c6/qt3sv1d2c6_noSplash_7125029d59791c501a0270e799a1c199.pdf?t=rxyaen)

## SCHOLARSHIPS, GRANTS, & AWARDS

### COSMOS Travel Grant,  Computational Summer school on Modeling Social and collective behavior (*$340*) | 2025

### CogSci Student Travel Award, Cognitive Science Society (*$1 000*) | 2025

### UCL Bogue Fellowship for research visit to Stanford University (*£6 500*) | 2025

### Alan Turing Institute PhD Enrichment Scheme (*£3 300*) | 2023

### Ph.D. Demonstratorship, Department of Psychology, UCL (*£144 000*) | 2020

### Dean's List, UCL MSc Psychological Sciences | 2020
  
### Prize for highest dissertation mark (UCL MSc thesis) | 2020

## INVITED LECTURES & TALKS

### From presentational to relational goals: a computational account of social motivations | April 2026
Saxe lab, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, MIT

### Taking others for granted: balancing personal and presentational goals in action selection | May 2025
CoCoSci, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, MIT

### Learning to control dynamical systems in continuous time | April 2025
Concats, Psychology Department, New York University

### Taking others for granted: balancing personal and presentational goals in action selection | March 2025
CiCL lab, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

## CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Btesh, V., Lagnado, D., and Gerstenberg, T. (2025). Taking others for granted: Balancing personal and presentational goals in action selection, Presented at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Btesh, V., Bramley, N., Speekenbrink, M., and Lagnado, D. (2024). Less is more: Local focus in continuous time causal learning. Presented at the International Conference on Thinking (ICT)

## POSTERS

Btesh, V., Bramley, N. R., Fränken, J.-P., Speekenbrink, M., and Lagnado, D. A. (2023). Variational inference in dynamical active causal learning. Poster presented at the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Conference

Btesh, V., Bramley, N. R., Speekenbrink, M., and Lagnado, D. A. (2023). Swipe and hold: Composing interventions in continuous time causal learning. Poster presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

## LECTURING

## SEMINAR AND SMALL GROUP TEACHING

### Demonstrator in Research Methods, MSc Psychological Sciences, UCL | 2020 -
- Ran weekly statistics lectures for 10-15 students on core research methods and modeling.
- Ran tutorials on study planning and implementation with Gorilla.
- Held weekly office hours supporting dissertations and coursework.
- Supervised students on statistics software and statistical programming.

## SUPERVISION AND TRAINING RECORD

Marvin Mathony, MSc Cognitive and Decision Sciences, UCL | 2024 - 2025

## PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

### Data Journalist, Slug News, Paris | May 2019-September 2019
- Built and maintained scrapers for two online marketplaces in a documentary investigation.
- Produced a structured database to track and detect network behavior.
- Built a TOR wrapper for crawlers to preserve anonymity and rotate IP addresses.
- Stack: Python, BeautifulSoup, Selenium, Pandas, Matplotlib.

### Consultant, SCENENT, Paris | Oct 2018-Sep 2019 and Jun-Jul 2017
- Strategic and organizational consulting across public sector and private-sector clients.
- Work included project management, process automation, market analysis, and executive workshops.

### Recruitment Executive, Bold Executives (ex Morgan McKinley France), Paris | Nov 2016-May 2017
- Candidate sourcing, CV screening, interviewing, and executive search.
- Recruitment for roles ranging from junior to senior management.

## PERSONAL INTERESTS

Science (physics and mathematics), rock climbing, music, programming and web development, and strategy/RPG video games.