Jan Balaguer

About me

I have an education in Telecommunications Engineering and Experimental Psychology. My research spans Reinforcement Learning, Game Theory, Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics.

I am native Spanish and Catalan, fluent in English and French, and learning German. I currently live in Berlin (previously in Barcelona, Paris, Oxford, and London).

I obsess with anything ... maths, programming, novels, music, photography, investing, macroeconomics, blockchain, videogames, VR, ...

Contact

Research

• Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models (2023) - arXiv
• Human-centred mechanism design with Democratic AI (2022) - Nature Human Behaviour
• The Good Shepherd: An Oracle Agent for Mechanism Design (2022) - arXiv
• PonderNet: Learning to Ponder (2021) - arXiv
• Optimal utility and probability functions for agents with finite computational precision (2020) - PNAS
• Decision-making with hierarchical representations in humans (2018) - Thesis
• The Memrise Prize (2025) - Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
• Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Encodes a Latent Estimate of Cumulative Reward (2017) - Neuron
• Neural Mechanisms of Hierarchical Planning in a Virtual Subway Network (2016) - Neuron