Joern has explored how humans learn, first as a linguist and then as a computational psychologist scientist during his Masters at Oxford, where he created deep learning models of the brain. In his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin he flipped his research on its head and studied how humans from diverse backgrounds learn to improve AI. He spent a month each year in an indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico and then channeled his insights to build state of the art computational models - one example is a model that detects irony in social media posts.