Our news
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Congratulations to Trenton Bricken!
march 31, 2025 Sparse representations in artificial and biological neural networks Congratulations to Trenton Bricken for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis!
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Humanity meets AI
feb 27-28 How might AI influence our understanding of humanity, morality, and meaning-making? Prof. Kreiman participated in a discussion panel with Prof. Dashi-Velez and Dr. Goodwin organized by the Harvard Divinity School The discussion focused on fascinating issues at the intersection of technology development, well-being, morality, and how to think about the role of humanity…
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AAAI 2025: The indoor training effect
Feb 27, 2025 Presentation at AAAI 2025 Serena Bono, Spandan Madan and colleagues present their work titled “The indoor training effect: unexpected gains from distribution shifts in the transition function”. This work reports surprising findings where algorithms trained under noisy conditions can generalize better than algorithms trained under noise-free conditions.
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The indoor training effect
feb 17, 2025 Scientists thought this would make AI worse but it made it smarter Note by Adam Zewe, MIT, about the work by Serena Bono and Spandan Madan in AAAI 2025 (see PDF here). SciTechDaily See more related work from the lab:
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Brains Minds and Machines Summer Course 2025
August 3, 2025 — august 24, 2025 Apply now to join the BMM Summer School The goal of this course is to help produce a community of leaders that is equally knowledgeable in neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science and will lead the scientific understanding of intelligence and the development of true biologically inspired AI.
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Using computational models to improve visual learning
jan 30, 2025 Morgan Talbot presenting at Vision Journal Club Morgan will be presenting the paper “L-WISE: Boosting Human Image Category Learning Through Model-Based Image Selection and Enhancement.” For a concise summary, please see the project website. The paper explores ways to enhance visual category learning in humans by applying adversarially trained ANNs as models of…
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How do neurons encode the order of events?
jan 29, 2025 Prefrontal and medial temporal neurons encode ordinal information of event sequences in humans Elisa Pavarino will be presenting her work jointly with Jie Zheng and Ueli Rurishauser.
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Generalization in ML: the indoor training effect
Jan 29, 2025 Is it better to train under noisy conditions to learn to generalize? New work by Serena Bono and Spandan Madan shed light on the mechanisms underlying generalization in reinforcement learning agents. This work led to discovering the indoor training effect whereby agents can improve their generalization performance under certain circumstances when trained…
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Generalization in models of vision
Jan 8, 2025 Evaluating how brains generalize: data from macaque monkeys reveals flaws in deep neural networks Anne Manning, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, reports on the work of Spandan Madan, Will Xiao and colleagues presented recently in NeurIPS. This work sheds light on the key Achilles heel of current…