Chris Summerfield

great opportunity to work with Marco using exciting new methods!

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

(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 :)

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.

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/...

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

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.