Alona Fyshe (@alonaf.bsky.social)

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

Associate prof @ UAlberta (CS and Psychology) studying language and semantic representations in the brain. TED speaker

Alona Fyshe reposted

@nicolaspapernot.bsky.social

Over 400 academics in 30+ countries signed our open letter calling for immediate changes in AI development and deployment practices to ensure that cybersecurity incidents do not continue to occur, as future incidents will be far more damaging to our critical infrastructure.

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

2 July

I am once again asking you to consider sending your amazing papers to the "Studying Language Processing in the Era of LLMs" Special Issue!

Alona Fyshe@alonaf.bsky.social

Submit an article to our SI "Studying Language Processing in the Era of LLMs" We're interested in papers using cognitive priors to improve LLM, using LLMs to understand the brain’s processing of language, or using theories/methods/tests inspired by cognitive science to understand LLMs, and more!

sciencedirect.comBrain and Language | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier - Brain and Language | ScienceDirect.com by ElsevierRead the latest articles of Brain and Language at ScienceDirect.com, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature

Alona Fyshe reposted

Replying to @bkhmsi.bsky.social

3/ 🌟 Joining us at Re-Align 2026 is a fantastic lineup of invited speakers covering ML, neuroscience, and cognitive science: David Bau, Arturo Deza, @judithfan.bsky.social, @alonaf.bsky.social, @phillipisola.bsky.social, and Danielle Perszyk!

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

31 Oct 2025

I'm hiring (another) post doc, this time in collaboration with Natalie Brito @nataliebrito.bsky.social at Columbia! We will be exploring some of the characteristics of human development using deep learning models. Email with questions! iaejup.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

iaejup.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.comPostdoctoral Fellow - Large Language Models as Models for Human DevelopmentThis position is part of the Post Doctoral Fellows Association and has an initial appointment of two years. This position has a comprehensive benefits package. Location - This role is in-person at Nor...

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

15 Sept 2025

I am hiring a post doc at UAlberta, affiliated with Amii! We study language processing in the brain using LLMs and neuroimaging. Looking for someone with experience with ideally both neuroimaging and LLMs, or a willingness to learn. Email me with Qs apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...

apps.ualberta.caPostdoctoral Fellow - Language Models and Neuroscience - Careers@UAlberta.caUniversity of Alberta: Careers@UAlberta.ca

Alona Fyshe reposted

The Transmitter

@thetransmitter.bsky.social

19 May 2025

Alona Fyshe @alonaf.bsky.social on the BabyLM Challenge, a competition that trains language models (LMs) on smaller datasets, more akin to how a baby learns, in search of solutions to some of the major challenges of today’s LLMs. #NeuroAI #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/the-...

thetransmitter.orgCan babies inspire more efficient learning algorithms?A competition that trains language models on smaller datasets, more akin to how a baby learns, seeks solutions to some of LLM’s major challenges.

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

16 May 2025

Did you know the famous man -> woman king -> queen analogy geometry in Mikolov et al (2013) was actually described in a 1973 paper by Rumelhart and Abrahamson? Thanks to the @jurafsky.bsky.social and Martin book for the reference!

sciencedirect.comA model for analogical reasoningA theory of analogical reasoning is proposed in which the elements of a set of concepts, e.g., animals, are represented as points in a multidimensiona…

Alona Fyshe reposted

Morten H. Christiansen

@mh-christiansen.bsky.social

29 Apr 2025

Every year at the end of the semester, I ask the students in my Psych of Language class to create memes about what they've learned. They then vote for their favorites. Here's the winner about how the idea of a universal grammar is no longer as compelling as it once seemed. 1/5

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

25 Apr 2025

Our ICLR poster is Saturday Morning (Hall 3 + Hall 2B #63)! We (myself with Cory Efird, Alex Murphy and Joel Zylberberg) are excited to share our work searching for Shared Decodable Concepts in the human brain. We used the Natural Scenes Dataset to find the concepts that most drive brain activity…

We loved looking through these results so much that we made a viewer to share all of them with the community: fyshelab.github.io/brain-viewer/ Have a look!

fyshelab.github.ioFlatmap Viewer

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

25 Apr 2025

Oh my goodness I forgot to link to the actual paper! Here it is! openreview.net/forum?id=L07...

openreview.netFinding Shared Decodable Concepts and their Negations in the BrainPrior work has offered evidence for functional localization in the brain; different anatomical regions preferentially activate for certain types of visual input. For example, the fusiform face area...

Our method also identified several body-related clusters (EBA in the figure). The positive representative images for one cluster showed people and animals outside with an emphasis on legs and active movement. The negative images typically depict people sitting with their legs obscured by tables.

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

25 Apr 2025

Another cluster emphasized hands instead of legs. Positive images show people with their hands clearly visible, while the negative images are exclusively non-primate animals without hands. Thus, the brain's “body” area may be made up of multiple more refined concepts (i.e. legs and hands).

Our method identified a large possibly food-related cluster with many positive food-related images, and the area aligned with a recently previously food area (i.e. the colored brain areas in the figure overlap with the reported food area).

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

25 Apr 2025

However, we also observed many vibrant and colorful positive images that contained no food. Strikingly, the negative representative images are entirely gray-scale! This provided very strong evidence that this brain area may be responding to color, not food.

These clusters allowed us to identify stimulus images that most drive neural activity in the voxels of a cluster (positive images), but also the images which are most associated with below-average voxel response (negative images).

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

25 Apr 2025

The positive and negative images provide additional evidence for the possible function of brain areas, helping us to refine hypotheses about the associated brain areas.

We first trained a model to map fMRI to CLIP representations. We then clustered the *parameters* of that model to identify voxels that are driven by certain CLIP concepts. Because we cluster in model parameter space, we can look for concept representations across participants.

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

25 Apr 2025

This clustering is done via our new variant of the DBSCAN algorithm, with adaptations to consider only clusters that contain voxels from more than 2 participants.

There have been multiple attempts to identify new functionally localized regions of the brain with some converging evidence; for example, a possible “food area” was recently reported.

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

25 Apr 2025

Still, only a few broad semantic categories have been identified, and they typically cover large areas of the brain. So… there may be other semantic categories localized in the brain (or a way to refine existing categories)!

Neuroimaging has revealed a lot about how the brain processes and organizes visual information. For example, there is evidence that certain areas of the brain activate in response to images depicting specific semantic concepts like faces, places, bodies, and words.

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

5 Mar 2025

Wonderful to see this recognition of Rich's contribution to AI and computing! Rich maintains the strong founding connections between cognition and AI, showing that studying intelligence can help us build intelligence. www.amii.ca/updates-insi...

amii.caRich Sutton awarded A.M. Turing Award for Reinforcement Learning ResearchACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic founda...

Alona Fyshe reposted

PsychUAlberta

@psychualberta.bsky.social

9 Jan 2024

Friday 12th January is the deadline to apply for our Assistant Professor in AI + Biological Cognition. Details below: careers.ualberta.ca/Competition/...

careers.ualberta.ca Assistant Professor, Artificial Intelligence & Biological Cognition - Competition No. A108052175

Alona Fyshe

@alonaf.bsky.social

28 Nov 2023

We are hiring at UAlberta: Assistant professor in AI + Biological Cognition. We are looking for a candidate who can play equally well in the AI and Neurosci fields, and contribute to our knowledge of how AI and neuroscience relate! www.careers.ualberta.ca/Competition/... Happy to field Qs by email

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