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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · 14d

Join a top interdisciplinary program exploring the intersection of artificial & natural intelligence. Strong ties with the @carneyinstitute.bsky.social, the Center for Computational Brain Science (CCBS), and the new NSF-funded AI Institute (ARIA).

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · 14d

Brown’s Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working in the area of AI and the Mind (start July 1, 2026). Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939

#AI #CognitiveScience #AcademicJobs #BrownUniversity

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · 19d

With Pieter Roelfsema, our TICS response to Scholte & de Haan (2025): in deep nets, distributed codes ≠ solved binding. Flexible vision needs dynamic grouping + attention (or object-centric slots) to link features to objects/relations. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Feature binding in biological and artificial vision

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · Jul 15

Day of Action planned for July 21 to protect science protectscienceandinnovation.org

Protect Science and Innovation

protectscienceandinnovation.org

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.bsky.social · Jun 9

🚨BREAKING: 300+ NIH employees call out the harm of censorship & politicized science in scathing email to Bhattacharya, demanding an end to political interference, a lift on funding freezes, & rehiring of fired staff whose work saves lives.

This is historic - insiders are blowing the whistle.
🧵(1/5)

Front-page-style graphic titled “BREAKING NEWS” with photos of RFK Jr. and Dr. Bhattacharya in front of a government hearing chamber. Text reads: “NIH Scientists Sound the Alarm as Health Research Faces Historic Threat” and “NIH Employees Send Trump Cronies Scathing Wake-Up Call.”

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Ann Kennedy @antihebbiann.bsky.social · Apr 30

From the NIH news desk: "NIH to prioritize human-based research technologies; new initiative aims to reduce use of animals in NIH-funded research"

www.nih.gov/news-events/...

NIH to prioritize human-based research technologies

New initiative aims to reduce use of animals in NIH-funded research.

www.nih.gov

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Apr 28

Read the full preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2504.16940

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology

Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception and neural responses as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in AI would yield better mo...

arxiv.org

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Apr 28

📢 Our takeaway: To truly model biological vision, vision science must diverge from conventional AI approaches and develop deep learning methods tailored to the intricacies of biological visual systems.

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Apr 28

🧠 This divergence suggests that DNNs may adopt visual strategies differing from those used by primates, as highlighted in our previous work on harmonization.

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Apr 28

🔍 Key finding: As DNNs achieve human or superhuman accuracy, their alignment with primate vision plateaus—and in some cases, deteriorates.

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Apr 28

🚨 New preprint alert!
Our latest study, led by @DrewLinsley, examines how deep neural networks (DNNs) optimized for image categorization align with primate vision, using neural and behavioral benchmarks.

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Tim Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social · Mar 25

Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow:
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Science Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond

Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.

elifesciences.org

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.bsky.social · Mar 6

WHERE WILL YOU BE TOMORROW?

Stand up for science flyer, happening on March 7th in DC & nationwide with more information at www.standupforscience2025.org

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · Mar 5

AI researchers should be worried about all their funding to make formers TRANS

Gigi Gronvall @ggronvall.bsky.social · Mar 5

Cancer research is going to disappear in the US because apparently no one in US leadership ever took a biology class. “DOGE found $8 million grant to make mice transgender. This is real.”

- Donald Trump, talking about transgenic mice to the world

www.irishstar.com/news/us-news...

Trump baffles with bizarre comment about 'transgender mice' in Congress speech

Donald Trump baffled viewers of his congressional address when he discussed the $8 million he said he and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had found for "making mice transgender"

www.irishstar.com

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · Mar 2

Francis Collins has had enough.

Good on him.

Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · Mar 1

Francis Collins, the NIH Director for 12 years, led the Human Genome Project and other NIH efforts for 32 years, resigned today. Key words from his resignation letter
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/u...

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

CantlonLab @cantlonlab.bsky.social · Feb 18

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠

sciencehomecoming.com

Science Homecoming

sciencehomecoming.com

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Feb 14

Apologies for probably not reading the paper carefully enough... I see mentions of "functional specialization" and evidence for a "language network" in LLMs. What is the evidence that the "specialized" units are part of a functional network?

Reposted by Thomas Serre

Steve Griffin @profstevegriffin.bsky.social · Feb 14

Laudable stance and brilliant letter from @scurry.bsky.social

Musk has no place amongst scientists, let alone one as a member of one of its most revered institutions.

Science sky, please consider signing and letting @royalsociety.org know your views.

occamstypewriter.org/scurry/

Reciprocal Space | Occam's Typewriter

occamstypewriter.org

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · Feb 7

The US government has been turned over to a group of extraordinarily ignorant people, and they are working to destroy science in this country. Cutting over half the NSF budget would save < 0.1% of the federal budget, but do incalculable harm. Simply heartbreaking.

arstechnica.com/science/2025...

White House budget proposal could shatter the National Science Foundation

“This kind of cut would kill American science and boost China.”…

arstechnica.com

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Reposted by Thomas Serre

Pascal Mamassian @mamassian.bsky.social · Jan 14

Do you want to study cognitive science and live in Paris?

Our master’s program in Cognitive Science at @ENS_ULM, @psl_univ, and @EHESS_fr is now accepting applications for 2025-2026. All courses are in English.

Deadline: 13 March 2025

More info: master-cognitive-science.ens.psl.eu/en

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Jan 6

Thanks for the explanation!

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Jan 3

Please note that I have no stake in this but is it possible that the same confound applies to your study?

Explaining the Timing of Natural Scene Understanding with a Computational Model of Perceptual Categorization

Author Summary The speed of sight has fascinated scientists and philosophers for centuries. In the blink of an eye, observers can rapidly and effortlessly perform a variety of categorization tasks suc...

journals.plos.org

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Jan 3

As an illustrative example, we had shown that we could sample natural scenes that would make the superordinate arbitrarily faster or slower than the basic level.

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Jan 3

Hi Michelle -- congrats on your paper! Many years ago, we showed that task difficulty is a significant confound in studies claiming that some categorization levels take precedence over others. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Explaining the Timing of Natural Scene Understanding with a Computational Model of Perceptual Categorization

Author Summary The speed of sight has fascinated scientists and philosophers for centuries. In the blink of an eye, observers can rapidly and effortlessly perform a variety of categorization tasks suc...

journals.plos.org

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Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · Dec 25

🙋