There are several recent papers which could fall under the heading ‘Economic History of the Scientific Revolution’ but this network analysis tracing how scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars in the period 1084-1793 is a real milestone, an ‘epidemiological’ model of how ideas spread like disease

U Auckland Faculty of Science is moving to a "two-lane" approach to assessment in the age of AI (educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au/teaching@syd...). Having read this critique (doi.org/10.1080/0729...), this seems like a bad idea to me. Any others moving/already moved to this approach have advice?

If anyone fancies moving to NZ, the @universityofotago.bsky.social are advertising for up to SIX faculty positions in their School of Psychology 👀 www.seek.co.nz/psychology-j...

Auckland Transport are very worried about Things.

Hello, I do!

My colleague Sam Schwarzkopf is looking for participants in an online study of mental imagery:

"We are researchers at the School of Optometry & Vision Science at the University of Auckland. If you are aged 16 years or older, we invite you to take part in an online experiment: tstbl.co/820-917 "

Thanks organisers for a great EPC/APCV (and congrats student prize winners). This year set a high bar for us, but we're looking forward to hosting both meetings next year in Auckland! #epc2026

Oh thank you! Hm this still looks super glossy (and/but deeper) when fused to me. Similar in VR I get the illusion strongly for a 2d or 3d object, but goes away if I can move the object (participants don't agree with me on that last bit)

We haven't asked about relief, only gloss. Wd be interesting.

Oh hey @maartenw.bsky.social good to see you on Bluesky! Check out the poster above. Your gloss illusion works well in VR and is strongly geometry dependent. But our Ss persist in seeing it even when they have stereo info and can move the object. Planning expt v3 where I hope to finally break it!

Here's the poster:

I'm poster 37 this afternoon at #epc2025 if anyone wants to hear about a material perception experiment in VR that is not working out how I'd expected 😅

Gene Tang @genetang.bsky.social will be talking about this project in stream 2 today (main room, 11-12:30) @expsyanz.bsky.social #epc2025

Would love to hear people's thoughts!

Took me a while but I solved the treasure hunt and made it to Sydney #EPC2025 #EPCAPCV2025

(what hashtag are we using?)

I am hiring a PhD student on the meaningful interpretation of effect sizes as part of my VICI funded project. This is a 4 year paid position in a welcoming and collaborative environment. Find out more or apply at www.tue.nl/werken-bij-t...

It was actually a conversation with Sarah Weigelt a year ago about that patient which gave us the idea for this project!

Sarah was asking what kind of DNN model might show similar deficits and I was like "....most of them, I reckon?"

One way of looking at these results is as a snapshot of which visual tasks are easy vs hard to learn from massive human-generated web corpora of text-and-image pairs.

It's interesting too that human vision, trained on natural images, generalises effortlessly to simplified lines, gabors, and shapes.

tldr: VLMs match or beat human performance in what vision science considers complex, high level visual tasks (face and object recognition) but struggle with low and mid level tasks (length, orientation, texture, occlusion).

We see "clinical deficits" (<2SD below human norm) on most "simple" tasks.

If GPT-4o walked into a neuro-opthalmology clinic, what would it be diagnosed with?

Here we administered 51 tests from 6 clinical and experimental batteries to assess vision in commercial AI models.

Very proud to share this first work from @genetang.bsky.social's PhD!

arxiv.org/abs/2504.10786

Oh this looks like an extremely useful guide for new lab members, thanks all!

All plants, left long enough, will tend towards a brassica.

This is the way the world ends — not with a bang, or a whimper, but with a crab atop its cabbage throne.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume?

Vision scientist: So it doesn't modally complete for you? Try covering one eye.

Phrased very broadly there. But they're probably not wrong that providing input to a CNN in the form of nicely structured receptive field responses is better than random RF responses (their random control) or raw pixels (their alex/google nets), at least when you have v limited training time & data.

Devil's Finger - a stinky native fungus!

If you're in Auckland, quick — go look under the trees outside the Science Centre on Symonds St!

Some excellent body horror going on in the flowerbeds.