great opportunity to work with Marco using exciting new methods!

Marco K Wittmann@mkwittmann.bsky.social · 12mo ago

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢 🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method. Please RT www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

in Oxford, a grade 7 (entry-level) postdoc costs about £180K for 3 years, including fringe. For UKRI grants, the university now adds **£460K** in overheads. is that normal? do other UK universities impose such outlandish FEC?

AISI has published its research agenda... www.aisi.gov.uk/research-age... There is so much amazing work going on at AISI. Expect much more in the way of published outputs over the coming months!

Research Agenda

View AISI grants. The AI Security Institute is a directorate of the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology that facilitates rigorous research to enable advanced AI governance.

aisi.gov.uk

I am SO excited to share my latest #preprint with @robbrutledge.bsky.social, Chongyu Qin, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Martin Chadwick, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, and others from DeepMind: "Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence" arxiv.org/abs/2504.02091 A short 🧵 1/7

Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence

Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have rapidly become a significant part of everyday life, with over a quarter of American adults using them multiple times per week. While these tools o...

arxiv.org

getting this paper published was a bit painful but I am proud of it: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We use deep RL to find mechanisms that help (real) people sustain the commons. Well done to Raphael Koster and Miruna Pislar (not on BlueSky). non-paywalled version on arxiv.

Deep reinforcement learning can promote sustainable human behaviour in a common-pool resource problem - Nature Communications

Koster et al introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism designed to manage common-pool resources successfully encourages sustainable cooperation among human participants by dynamically adj...

nature.com

I really, really enjoyed Coming of Age by @lucyfoulkes.bsky.social. it's wise and poignant in equal measure. tinyurl.com/4e82na8v.

Coming of Age

Adolescence is the most misunderstood period of our lives. Coming of Age draws on a decade of expert research to get beneath the stereotypes, expose the myths and reveal the real reasons why teens beh...

tinyurl.com

US version. thank you very much @vikingbooks.bsky.social. I like the black cover more!

Viking Books@vikingbooks.bsky.social · last yr.

ON SALE TODAY! 🧠💻 Christopher Summerfield's (@summerfieldlab.bsky.social) "brilliant" (@mustafasuleymanai.bsky.social) THESE STRANGE NEW MINDS charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and helps us understand how they work and how we can use them. Start reading now 👉 bit.ly/41WoPTB

Amazing - there is still at least one senior academic who is not afraid to tell it how it is!

Masud Husain@masudhusain.bsky.social · last yr.

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Thank you so much Rebecca! it's been such a pleasure to work with you.

Rebecca Carter@rebeccasbooks.bsky.social · last yr.

Happy Publication Day @summerfieldlab.bsky.social whose brilliant ‘THESE STRANGE NEW MINDS: How AI Learnt to Talk and What It Means’ is published by Viking Penguin today. It is an honour to work with such a dazzlingly human mind.

I am a bit bashful about sharing this profile www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... of me in @thetimes.com, but will do so because it kindly refers to my new book which is coming out in early March. www.penguin.co.uk/books/460891.... The tech titans pictured seem to be decoration (and not my co-authors)

These Strange New Minds

Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and r...

penguin.co.uk

New paper led by the unstoppable @qingtianmi.bsky.social. We study how people learn a task that involves combining multiple sources of information. We work out which curricula work best, build a model, and use it to successfully discover new curricula. enjoy! osf.io/preprints/ps...

BAMB! is happening again in 2025. Learn how to model your behavioural data, next to the beach in Barcelona! keynotes this year from @athenaakrami.bsky.social and Peter Dayan.

@alexhyafil.bsky.social · 2y ago

Our Barcelona-based summer school, BAMB! (bambschool.org) just opened applications! Come join us: 15-24th July, to learn how to model behavioral data using RL, Bayesian, latent variable models, RNNs, DDMs & more! #BAMB2025

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...

a CS department of a very prominent US university just asked me to write a reference letter for a candidate that they are *planning on* attempting to headhunt from a major tech firm, but whom they have not actually contacted yet. Is that a thing?? what a waste of everyone's time!

I never fail to learn something from Mark's excellent round up! thank you for doing this :)

Mark D Humphries@markdhumphries.bsky.social · 2y ago

Cutting it a bit fine, but here’s my review of the year in neuroscience for 2024 The eighth of these, would you believe? We’ve got dark neurons, tiny monkeys, the most complete brain wiring diagram ever constructed, and much more… Published on The Spike Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

new researcher positions at UK AI Safety Institute! a behavioural / cognitive scientist with AI research experience civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi... and a computational social scientist civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi... to work on the social / psychological impacts of AI

Research Scientist, Engineer and many other roles advertised at UK AI Safety Institute. tinyurl.com/5t32h2p6 Come and work at the cutting edge of AI research from within government! Message me if you want more information. Coming soon: more roles with cog sci / computational social science focus.

Open letter to the Society for Neuroscience leadership (led by Rich Ivry) regarding the climate impact of the annual meeting: bit.ly/LetterToSfNL...

I've been using this book as reading for UG Cognition lectures in Oxford. It's marvellous - best textbook I've come across for a while. Steve and Marvin have done us all a service in writing this, strongly recommend.

Steve Most@sbmost.bsky.social · 3y ago

Hello, Psychonomics! Not sure if Oxford University Press has a stall this year, but if you’re interested in checking out Marvin Chun’s and my new Cognition textbook, you can find sample chapters and other info here: pages.oup.com/he/us/cognit...

Wikipedia's own article about itself contains an editorial note complaining that it is excessively promotional in tone. That is really quite meta

round up of advances in AI from the other place. Anyone else excited by this new AI called MEG?

interesting vacancy for an RE to work at the intersection of AI and social science: www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/the-college/...

authors claim GPT-4 provide human-quality reviews of Nature family journals *with no fine tuning*. This seems bonkers to me, if true can only tell us about the parlous state of human review, esp. at glam journals: arxiv.org/abs/2310.01427

attention computational neuroscientists. Cosyne submissions are open for the 2024 meeting in Lisbon. www.cosyne.org/abstracts-su...

I am looking forward to this event - thanks for organising Caswell

Caswell Barry@caswell.bsky.social · 3y ago

UCL annual NeuroAI meeting. 28th November. We’ve got cool speakers. Lightening talks. Posters. And it’s streamed for people who aren’t in London. What’s not to like?! www.eventbrite.com/e/ucl-neuroa...

Helen and Dave Edwards were kind enough to invite me onto their podcast Artificiality. I am not sure how much sense I made but here you are anyway: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

I just started to read this book and it is masterful. essential reading for anyone interested in the intersection of technology and political science: www.cambridge.org/core/books/p...

hello world. here for obvious reasons. let's hope this one sticks.