George Alvarez
@grez72
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Cognitive Scientist, co-Director of the Vision Sciences Laboratory at Harvard University, Department of Psychology
Belmont, MA
Joined April 2009
I'm hiring a postdoc in the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard, run jointly with @talia_konkle. If you're interested in using deep neural network models to understand human visual processing & human intuitive physical reasoning, please apply here
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🧵 Can a purely feedforward network — with no recurrence or lateral connections — capture human-like perceptual organization? 🤯 Yes! Especially for contour integration, and we pinpoint the key inductive biases. New paper in @PLOSCompBiol with @talia_konkle & @grez72! 1/24
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Applications are now open for our #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships! Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply. Learn more and apply by Oct. 1: https://t.co/R82ADXfur0
#LLMs #NeuroAI #ML @ShamKakade6 @blsabatini
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu
The Kempner brings leading, early-stage postdoctoral scientists to Harvard to work on projects that advance the fundamental understanding of intelligence.
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#CCN2025 begins tomorrow! Check out the presentations from the #kempnerinstitute. #NeuroAI #neuroscience
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In this piece published in The Hill, fellow Turing laureate David Patterson points out that the return on investment of government-funded research in universities is gigantic. Cutting the budgets of NSF and NIH is economic suicide. https://t.co/NmAsI5JXQG
thehill.com
Virtually every smartphone on the planet runs on a chip paid for by American taxpayers — a chip that I helped invent. Now Congress is moving to cut funding for the National Science Foundation that …
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A team from #KempnerInstitute, @hseas & @UTCompSci has won a best paper award at #ICML2025 for work unlocking the potential of masked diffusion models. Congrats to @Jaeyeon_Kim_0, @shahkulin98, Vasilis Kontonis, @ShamKakade6 and @sitanch. https://t.co/RyoDM6jwLm
#AI
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu
A paper authored by Kempner Institute researchers and collaborators has won an outstanding paper award at ICML 2025, the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, held July 13 – 19, […]
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🧵 What if two images have the same local parts but represent different global shapes purely through part arrangement? Humans can spot the difference instantly! The question is can vision models do the same? 1/15
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To help computational cognitive scientist engage with more naturalistic experiments, I've made NiceWebRL. NiceWebRL is a Python library for designing human subject experiments that leverage machine reinforcement learning environments. https://t.co/ogdXTEX9Ha
github.com
NiceWebRL is a Python library for quickly making human subject experiments that leverage machine reinforcement learning environments. - KempnerInstitute/nicewebrl
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Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here: https://t.co/ERy2Spc7c2 We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs. Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!
visionbook.mit.edu
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🎙️ Next up in the NeuroAI Emerging Leaders Webinar Series! We’re thrilled to host @t_andy_keller on May 8th, sharing his latest work at the frontier of NeuroAI. 📍 Register for free! https://t.co/XLKUOW7Iaa 🔗 Find out more: https://t.co/WwCXHDDB5K
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saying “no circuits” is like claiming there are no roads in a city, just cars moving around. sure, traffic depends on where people go — but some paths get paved. put differently: meaning may be relational, but some relations — like induction heads and edge detectors —
@Napoolar @basedneoleo There are no mechanisms or circuits
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NEW in the #KempnerInstitute blog: Want consistent & stable #SAE concepts across training runs? Archetypal SAE anchors concepts in the real data’s convex hull and delivers consistent & stable dictionaries! Read the blog:
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu
In recent years, the field of interpretability has focused heavily on concept-based approaches. As deep learning models advance to unprecedented scales in vision, language, and multimodal domains,...
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#VSS2025 | Vision Sciences Society is Honored to Present Jody Culham with the 2025 Davida Teller Award! For more information about Dr. Culham and the Davida Teller Award, please visit https://t.co/e47oXnKW4M
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Train your vision SAE on Monday, then again on Tuesday, and you'll find only about 30% of the learned concepts match. ⚓ We propose Archetypal SAE which anchors concepts in the real data’s convex hull, delivering stable and consistent dictionaries. https://t.co/cNSJsowIE7
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Excited to return to my PhD institution to give this talk next week! https://t.co/9wfhmblX51
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🚨Deadline approaching! Apply for our post-baccalaureate program by Feb. 1. Details:
College grads interested in intelligence research: the application for #KempnerInstitute's post-bac program w/ the @HarvardGSAS Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging is now open! Apply by 2/1/2025. https://t.co/jdJrzRegL0
@EllaBatty @grez72 @ShamKakade6 @blsabatini
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We are excited that Ellie Pavlick from Brown University & Google DeepMind will be the third keynote speaker of CCN2025! Join us in August for the 8th CCN conference, on cognitive science, neuroscience, and AI. Details on paper submission (both short & full length papers) below!
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We are thrilled to share the appointment of @s_y_chung as an #KempnerInstitute Investigator, bringing her expertise in using #AI to understand #brain structure and function to @Harvard. Read the announcement: https://t.co/AzLAP2LCGN
@hseas @harvardphysics
kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu
CAMBRIDGE, MA —The Kempner Institute announced today the appointment of SueYeon Chung (PhD ‘17), who returns to Harvard as a Kempner Institute Investigator and faculty member in the Faculty of […]
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