"So, you have a highly predictive model, now what?" At this #CCN2026 event on Wed, 5 Aug, 4pm at NYU Skirball Theatre I will present work on using ANN brain models for visual prostheses (tinyurl.com/modelguidedm...) and for dyslexia (tinyurl.com/neuroaidysle..., first author: Melika Honarmand).

Excited to be at #CCN2026 in NYC! I'll be presenting our spotlight poster, Topo-Omni, with @hannesmehrer.bsky.social 🧠 📍 Poster F14 — Session F 🗓️ Thursday, Aug 6 Come by if you're around, we'd love to talk about how our multimodal model can discover functionally selective brain regions!

Finally wrote up something I've been thinking about for a while, and with CCN next week, feels like the moment to share it: is the "virtuous circle" between AI and neuroscience that Hassabis et al. described in 2017 still turning? Curious what you think! bkhmsi.substack.com/p/ai-and-neu...

AI and Neuroscience: Still a Virtuous Circle?

Neuroscience once handed AI its best ideas. Today the current runs mostly the other way.

bkhmsi.substack.com

Atari from raw pixels. AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol. AlphaFold. DeepMind has inspired me for years, and its neuroscience work is why I got into NeuroAI. So it means a lot to say I've joined Google DeepMind in Zurich as a Student Researcher for the next few months. In Zurich? Say hi :)

🚨 NEW PREPRINT Videos strongly shape activity across the visual cortex. But can we design videos that maximally drive specific brain regions? We present NEvo 🧬🧠 — a neural-guided evolutionary framework that synthesizes videos to maximally activate target visual ROIs. (1/10)

🧠 What's the best way to spend compute & neural data to build brain-aligned models? Our new ICML 2026 paper charts the scaling laws across 8 neural datasets & 600+ vision models. 👇 🌐 multimodal-brain-scaling.epfl.ch w/ @davidtyt.bsky.social & @mschrimpf.bsky.social

Our work on Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners (MiCRo) made EPFL's front page today! 🎉 Read the full story here: actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-re... Grateful to everyone involved!

EPFL researchers create an AI model that thinks like we do

An EPFL team has created a new Large Language Model that is structured similarly to a human brain, allowing users more control and moving away from “black box” AI.

actu.epfl.ch

🧠🎬 RELEASE We are releasing two Hugging Face model cards for video brain encoding. 🎥 short video clips → 🧠 brain responses MODEL 1: vjepa2-basic
🔗 huggingface.co/epfl-neuroai... MODEL 2: vjepa2-enhanced
🔗 huggingface.co/epfl-neuroai... Brain encoders. Off the shelf !

epfl-neuroai/vjepa2-encoder-basic · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

A wiring-cost-like loss has been shown to induce brain-like topography in vision (eg www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... and language (e.g. topolm.epfl.ch, toponets.github.io). The same spatial loss yields cognitive clusters in a multimodal model which even discovers new ones! topo-omni.epfl.ch #NeuroAI🤖🧠🧪

A unifying framework for functional organization in early and higher ventral visual cortex

Margalit et al. develop a topographic artificial neural network that predicts both functional responses and spatial organization of multiple cortical areas of the primate visual system. In turn, the m...

cell.com

Badr AlKhamissi@bkhmsi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨 New Preprint! 🧠 We gave an AI model one simple rule: rearrange your neurons so that nearby ones respond alike. We never told it what a face, a voice, or a sentence was. It grew brain-like maps for all three anyway. 🧵👇 🌐 Website: topo-omni.epfl.ch

🚨 New Preprint! 🧠 We gave an AI model one simple rule: rearrange your neurons so that nearby ones respond alike. We never told it what a face, a voice, or a sentence was. It grew brain-like maps for all three anyway. 🧵👇 🌐 Website: topo-omni.epfl.ch

So why build toward a brain-encoding foundation model? → Simulate fMRI responses to sensory stimuli → Insights about the brain → Path toward clinical applications MIRAGE is our first step. 🧠 More on the project site: mirage-brain.epfl.ch w/ @akgokce.bsky.social & @mschrimpf.bsky.social

Badr AlKhamissi@bkhmsi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🧠 When you watch a movie, your brain blends sight, sound, and speech into a single experience. Should models of the brain blend them too, or keep the senses separate until the very end? We built MIRAGE to find out. It sets a new SOTA for predicting whole-brain fMRI from movies. 🧵

Two simple ideas for building improved brain encoding models: 1. learn to use representations from all model layers via a gating mechanism + 2. start from natively multimodal features for multimodal predictions. State of the art performance; see mirage-brain.epfl.ch for details #NeuroAI 🧠🤖🧪

Badr AlKhamissi@bkhmsi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🧠 When you watch a movie, your brain blends sight, sound, and speech into a single experience. Should models of the brain blend them too, or keep the senses separate until the very end? We built MIRAGE to find out. It sets a new SOTA for predicting whole-brain fMRI from movies. 🧵

🧠 When you watch a movie, your brain blends sight, sound, and speech into a single experience. Should models of the brain blend them too, or keep the senses separate until the very end? We built MIRAGE to find out. It sets a new SOTA for predicting whole-brain fMRI from movies. 🧵

Crossed 1,000 citations on Google Scholar today, with an h-index of 15 🎈 What felt like a distant goal a few years ago is now real, and I'm especially proud that the bulk of it is carried by my first-author papers. On to the next milestone!

Good morning #ICLR2026 ☀️ The Re-Align workshop kicks off in under an hour! A full day on what we can actually do with representational alignment, from brains to language models to agents. Schedule in the thread 👇

Excited to be in Rio for #ICLR2026 🇧🇷 I'll be presenting our work, Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners (aka MiCRo), on Friday at Pavilion 3, 10:30 AM (#1610). Come say hi :D Happy to chat about NeuroAI, representational & cultural alignment, and/or test-time learning 🧠

The current direction of AI labs is “we’re building something that’s going to replace you and we have no plan to make sure you’re going to land in a better place, but we’ll make billions.” The logical reaction is, “shut it down.” Labs need to get serious on addressing labor impacts.

Had the pleasure of being an invited speaker at the KAUST Rising Stars in AI Symposium last week. Inspiring to meet such a talented group of fellow rising stars and learn about their exciting work. Thanks to the KAUST team for a wonderful event!

🚀 The Re-Align Challenge is now LIVE! We’re inviting you to explore what properties of vision models and data lead to convergences and divergences in representational alignment. 🔗 Get started: huggingface.co/spaces/repre... 🧵👇

Re-Align Hackathon Leaderboard - a Hugging Face Space by representational-alignment

Submit Blue/Red hackathon JSON and rank by alignment scores.

huggingface.co

Happy to share that our paper “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners: Modular Reasoning with Brain-Like Specialization” (aka MiCRo) has been accepted to #ICLR2026!! 🎉 See you in Rio 🇧🇷 🏝️

Badr AlKhamissi@bkhmsi.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚀 Excited to share a major update to our “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners” (MiCRo) paper! We ask: What benefits can we unlock by designing language models whose inner structure mirrors the brain’s functional specialization? More below 🧠👇 cognitive-reasoners.epfl.ch

Three years ago, I built a website called Egyptians in AI Research. Today, that project has grown into Egyptian Researchers in Computer Science thanks to the help of @mo-mo2025.bsky.social! I wrote a blog post on how it grew, and why it expanded beyond AI. 🔗 egyptians-in-cs.github.io 🧵👇

Egyptian Researchers in Computer Science

A website dedicated to showcasing the profiles of prominent Egyptian researchers in Computer Science.

egyptians-in-cs.github.io

Great to see our "From Language to Cognition" work featured in @mordecwhy.bsky.social's latest piece on language models and the brain. Glad to contribute to the conversation! www.foommagazine.org/language-mod...

Language models resemble more than just language cortex, show neuroscientists

In a paper presented in November 2025 at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Massachusetts Ins...

foommagazine.org

Missed the Re-Align hackathon at ICLR or CCN 2025 — or want more? 🙂 Re-Align is back at ICLR 2026 🚀 Beyond the paper track, we’re launching a persistent shared-task challenge + challenge paper track. Can’t wait to see your creative & critical takes on representational alignment 🔥🥳

Badr AlKhamissi@bkhmsi.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🎉 Re-Align is back for its 4th edition at ICLR 2026! 📣 We invite submissions on representational alignment, spanning ML, Neuroscience, CogSci, and related fields. 📝 Tracks: Short (≤5p), Long (≤10p), Challenge (blog) ⏰ Deadline: Feb 5, 2026 for papers 🔗 representational-alignment.github.io/2026/

🎉 Re-Align is back for its 4th edition at ICLR 2026! 📣 We invite submissions on representational alignment, spanning ML, Neuroscience, CogSci, and related fields. 📝 Tracks: Short (≤5p), Long (≤10p), Challenge (blog) ⏰ Deadline: Feb 5, 2026 for papers 🔗 representational-alignment.github.io/2026/

This year was hard, personally and globally, from ongoing visa issues that disrupted my life and may prevent me from achieving one of my dreams, to the state of the world itself. Still grateful for what I achieved and for everyone who supported me. Wishing us all a brighter year ahead. ✨

1/ 🌍 How does mixing data from hundreds of languages affect LLM training? In our new paper "Revisiting Multilingual Data Mixtures in Language Model Pretraining" we revisit core assumptions about multilinguality using 1.1B-3B models trained on up to 400 languages. 🧵👇

Looking forward to be speaking at IndabaX Sudan on Building Responsible and Ethical LLMs! 📅 Saturday, December 13th ⏰ 2:00 PM (GMT+2) Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... See you all there! :)

Not attending NeurIPS this year, but very much looking to connect. I’m seeking a PhD research internship next summer in AI for Science, especially where AI meets brain and cognitive sciences. 🧠 If you’re hiring, I’d love to connect! bkhmsi.github.io

Badr AlKhamissi's Website

I am a PhD candidate at EPFL, co-advised by Antoine Bosselut and Martin Schrimpf. My research lies at the intersection of machine learning, neuroscience and cognitive science. Prior to EPFL, I was an ...

bkhmsi.github.io

I finally found time to update the Egyptians in AI Research website, apologies for the delay! Super excited to share that we now feature 227 incredible Egyptian researchers!! 🤯 Link: bkhmsi.github.io/egyptians-in...

Egyptians in AI Research

A website dedicated to showcasing the profiles of prominent Egyptian researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

bkhmsi.github.io

On my way to #EMNLP2025 🇨🇳 I’ll be presenting our work (Oral) on Nov 5, Special Theme session, Room A106-107 at 14:30. Let’s talk brains 🧠, machines 🤖, and everything in between :D Looking forward to all the amazing discussions!