Pouya Bashivan 🇮🇷🇨🇦

I'm looking for a PhD student in my lab. Mila is one of the best academic AI research institutions with a strong neuroAI community. Please apply to if you are interested!

1/ 🚀 We’re hiring a PhD student + a Postdoc to build foundation models for behaviour — where large-scale behavioural video meets deep learning. 📍 Douglas Research Centre / McGill + Mila, Montréal 🇨🇦 Apply 👉 l1nk.dev/j1zfg0k 🧵

Do you have any fun memories from past CCN conferences? Please share your experiences and any photos you have from previous CCNs! We are organizing an event for #CCN2026 to remember previous years.

🚀 PhD position in #NeuroAI & neurodevelopment 🚀 Co-supervised by Sarah Lippé and myself, to investigate visual processing & cognition abnormalities in children with neurodevelopmental disorders in a neuroAI framework. Full project details and how to apply here: tinyurl.com/kbuyntpn 🧠🤖 📈

postdoc and PhD positions in visual cognitive computational neuroscience in my lab at the University of Cambridge kamilajozwik.com/join_lab.html

Our work on building world models from episodic memories is accepted to #ICLR26! Led by (then undergraduate, now masters student) @herbiehe.bsky.social Check out the tweeprint!

Super proud of this work co-led by graduate students Ali Saheb Pasand and @johanoosterman.bsky.social and fantastic collaboration with Aaron Courville and @pcastr.bsky.social

Very proud of this work by @motaharehpr.bsky.social ! Glad to see it accepted as a talk at #Cosyne2026 Tldr; training a neural net to search for objects in natural scenes made it not only behave like humans but also made it converge on similar computations and representations as primates!

Today we’re releasing the International AI Safety Report 2026: the most comprehensive evidence-based assessment of AI capabilities, emerging risks, and safety measures to date. 🧵 (1/19)

Soon hiring a lab manager! Looking for someone who is really interested in language neuroscience, who is organised, motivated, a great communicator, and who works well in a research team. Express interest by submitting this form: tinyurl.com/glysn-labman... Reposts appreciated!

Submit your #NeuroAI papers to the full proceedings track of CCN! 8 page papers, ML conference style fast review turnaround

Very much looking forward to this series of workshops on the computational ingredients of reasoning. We have an amazing lineup of speakers from diverse backgrounds, and there will be lots of opportunities for discussion. Please consider attending!

Interesting essay by Tim Dettmers. Although I don’t fully agree with all the predictions, the contrast between China and North America’s approach to practical AI will potentially be defining in years to come

Great start at our cognitive benchmarking in large models session at #MontAIN2025 #MAIN2025

For those attending the #CogInterp workshop at NeurIPS, please check out our work on visual symbolic mechanisms led by @rassouel.bsky.social and @thisisadax.bsky.social. We find that visual feature binding in VLMs is supported by emergent symbolic mechanisms.

Great to see such efforts curating larger scale neuroimaging datasets! Really important for building foundation models for neuroscience!

Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are excited to announce that the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting (CCN 2026) will be held at New York University from August 3–6, 2026. 2026.ccneuro.org

PSA for academics involved in designing admissions systems: Setting a specific time-of-day deadline is *ri*dic*ul*ous* and super annoying!!!! Do you really care if I submit this lettter at 6PM rather than 4PM? Were you planning on reviewing my letter that evening? Get real... #academia

VLMs are truly caught in the middle! We found that they are great at describing what they see AND great at reasoning from text. But, they fail to connect them without an explicit text bridge. Come talk to us about this and more at #Neurips2025

I still see much focus on single factor coding in studies of medial temporal cortex. Although our results in primate hippocampus indicates a more mixed code www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Always!

I’m looking for interns to join our lab for a project on foundation models in neuroscience. Funded by @ivado.bsky.social and in collaboration with the IVADO regroupement 1 (AI and Neuroscience: ivado.ca/en/regroupem...). Interested? See the details in the comments. (1/3) 🧠🤖

The future of Canadian research

Great Blueprint from @arnaghosh.bsky.social on our newest paper on representational geometry! tl;dr: we find that during pretraining LLMs undergo consistent cycles of expansion/recuction in the dimensionality of their representations & these cycles correlate with the emergence of new capabilities.

This sounds like a foundation model for C elegans. Great idea in principle!

Great opportunity to do a postdoc in Canada

For obvious reasons… congrats @yoshuabengio.bsky.social

Despite the negative feelings about this, I sense some complementary metric like this that measures leadership vs collaboration would be very informative

Excellent funding opportunity: $100k/year for two years for a postdoc position in Montreal. Apply if you're interested in joining Montreal's thriving #NeuroAI ecosystem.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT📣: I haven’t been this excited to be part of something new in 15 years… Thrilled to reveal the passion project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half!🙀🥳 (thread 👇)

Consider applying to Mila if you are interested in NeuroAI! There is a great line up of profs working in that area. P.s. I also have an opening for a PhD student in my lab for Fall 2026.

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience. #neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

New position paper! We argue that symbolic and neural network models are not in opposition to each other, but occupy different levels of analysis, and also outline a new research agenda for better understanding the relationship between them. Please check out the paper / thread for more details!

Went over the Centaur paper in lab meeting today. I got stuck on this plot, thinking initially the small difference between Llama and Centaur is bothering me. But the real issue hit me an hour later... Each layer's neural similarity is with the **whole** brain! No single layer is expected to sim 🧠

Grant reviewer on my proposal for using DNNs to model working memory: “The ability to yield new information is very limited because WM circuits have already been abundantly specified in clinical and preclinical studies.” So, it’s entirely solved now, eh? How long did I sleep last night?

Huge congratulations to @silicolabs.bsky.social on this achievement. Excited about this collaboration on visuomotor learning in VR. We also have some funding available for graduate students interested in doing research in this area. Reach out if you're interested. 🧠📈 🧠🤖 #VisionScience

Self supervised learning of spatial representations from episodic memories. Led by undergraduate student in my lab. Very proud!

Announcement: Workshop at #CCN2025 🧠 Modeling the Physical Brain: Spatial Organization & Biophysical Constraints 🗓️ Monday, Aug 11 | 🕦 11:30–18:00 CET | 📍 Room A2.07 🔗 Register: tinyurl.com/CCN-physical... #NeuroAI @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

If you are at #ICLR2025 and interested in topographic neural networks, come by @amirozhan.bsky.social 's poster. See the info below!

A point of pride for me was publishing a paper with a meme as a graphical abstract in a journal that dates back to 1878: physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... This is apparently a #TopViewedArticle, so the achievement got the recognition it deserves! 😅 CC @kordinglab.bsky.social