MSR strictly requires that the intern is still a PhD student on the day the internship begins. If they graduate the next day, that is fine (I had an intern like that). If they graduate a day before, it's not.
Try my work email: idamo [at] Microsoft dot com
A paid summer internship is available in Microsoft Research NYC for a *PhD student later in their degree*, with experience designing human questionnaires/experiments, collecting data on prolific, running statistical analysis, and writing papers. If you know exceptional candidates please ping me. 🙏
Going to Cosyne? There will be a "Biologically-inspired Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities" workshop on Monday 16th! 🧠
Exciting lineup of speakers alongside the opportunity to present your #NeuroAI poster, more info on program & poster signup below!
#compneuro #neuroscience
Congrats!!!
Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation
Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
The scope & causes of drift or stability (e.g., connectivity, continual learning) are however empirical matters to be studied/modeled. Would it not be odd to reject stable representations anywhere under any condition by generalizing limited V1 evidence?
Small joys in dark times.
Brooklyn Public Library and @simonsfoundation.org present
Night in the Library:
The Philosophy of Mathematics
Free Event at Brooklyn Central Library
Pi Day, Saturday 3/14
7 p.m. to 3:14 a.m
Keynote Address by Werner Herzog
www.bklynlibrary.org/night-library
Agreed and We do so here:
Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models. www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.15987
Post from twitter on our @clarkesworld account from 11:48AM on Feb 20, 2023. "Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why."
Today is the 3rd slopiversary of us having to temporarily close submissions. The problem of "AI"-generated submissions hasn't gone away and is still a huge waste of our time. House policy remains the same: #noAI stories, translation, art, or anything else.
But that doesn’t at all capture the specifics addressed in the book. I’d like to restate that the book specifically addresses absurd philosophies and statistics underlying industrial AI and EA that render ethical concern for living beings irrelevant. I recommend reading the book.
Agreed. Though I hold a different place for this book compared to a fiction film. IMO it’s important not to blur the boundaries of fiction and reality. This book references real papers, essays, books, publicly held opinions, moving of funds, with their underlying philosophies & their consequences.
This book should be essential reading for anyone who has anything to do with AI. Well researched, with proper reference to recent history, revealing the insane underlying philosophies that enthusiastic techies & EA advocates buy into in the name of techno optimism.
On the invitation for a commentary on Mazviita Chirimuuta's The Brain Abstracted, I had the pleasure of writing on equating the brain with computation.
The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain
in Philosophy & the Mind Sciences.
Below see what I agree & disagree with in the book.
🧵 1/n
Little smart critters..🪰🐝🐜
Cognitive primitives of the insect brain: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
I enjoyed talking with @kensycoop.bsky.social on the Many Minds podcast about the metaphors we use to conceptualize AI.
manyminds.libsyn.com/seven-metaph...
Yes, I believe we discussed this with Rosa a few years ago at the learning salon. My proposal of ontological reversal falls in this tradition, and @neddo.bsky.social's work as well.
After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).
Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Congrats Sina! Great work!
Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions
rdcu.be/eRVUk
Thank you for the kind words.
Exciting! Congrats!!
Well said. IMO it’s not just about industry per se (though it is) but also due to the dominance of intellectual traditions that machinify minds, since the 1700s. I touch on this in
“The ontological reversal of computation and the brain”
But there’s a lot more to discuss & write on this.
An Underrated classic.
Thank you, it points out philosophy’s role in cog neuro to show Chirimuuta’s critique of neuroscience abstractions can be traced back to philosophy, that the two are entangled. It’s about ontological reversal in conflating computation with minds/brains, & how to undo it.
Hope you enjoy it!
Let me know your thoughts! These discussions are especially important for those of us who use computational modeling to understand real living minds.
It's been a pleasure to engage deeply w the intersection of brains/minds/computation. IMO especially now it's crucial to think philosophically about how tools/models/AI are shifting our ontology, what we take as real minds.
Thanks to Mazviita, @melaniemitchell.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social
Takeshi Kuribayashi’s installation, For Trees, 2015.
I close with Kuribayashi’s For Trees 2015. He sealed cut-up pieces of a tree in glass boxes, but each box turned into an evolving ecology. Likewise, interdisciplinary mastery can observe plural abstractions as bounded ecologies, rather than a single map of reality that replaces the territory.
15/n
I propose that in order to pursue understanding, Undoing Ontological Reversal requires true interdisciplinary mastery, not disciplinary withdrawal. Only by tracking how abstractions move, stabilize, & feed back across disciplines can we resist mistaking tools of control for accounts of reality.
14/n
