Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted

Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 2d

Every class on machine learning should study the datasets upon which the field was built. They provide more insights than any probability bound.

Benchmarking our benchmarks

The only validated theories of generalization are sociological and historical.

www.argmin.net

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Reposted

Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social · 5d

every single tech idea is like “soon our robots will be capable of playing catch with your kid, freeing you up to spend more time working on your employers’ spreadsheets”

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Reposted

Sam Nastase @samnastase.bsky.social · 14d

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

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Reposted

aaron bornstein @aaronbornstein.bsky.social · Sep 11

Come work with us! UC Irvine Cognitive Sciences is looking for a new Assistant Professor to join our team: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09896

I'm not on the committee, but happy to talk if you're interested.

Assistant Professor - Cognitive Sciences

University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ap.uci.edu

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Reposted

Martin Schrimpf @mschrimpf.bsky.social · 17d

Come be our colleague at EPFL! Several open calls for positions 🧪🧠🤖

* Neuroscience www.epfl.ch/about/workin... (deadline Oct 1)

* Life Science Engineering www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

* CS general call www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

* Learning Sciences www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

Faculty Position in Neuroscience

The School of Life Sciences at EPFL invites applications for a Tenure Track Assistant Professor position in Neuroscience. At EPFL researchers develop and apply innovative technologies to understand br...

www.epfl.ch

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Reposted

Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 18d

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has written another tour de force, showing how efficient coding reshapes numerosity representations in parietal cortex.

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 20d

Distributed range adaptation in human parietal encoding of numbers https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.25.675916v1

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Reposted

Siqi Liu (刘思奇) @liusiqi.bsky.social · 19d

We have got exciting (and unconventional) stuff cooking and we are hiring for a strong research engineer on the GDM Game Theory team in London.

Consider apply if you are interested in the intersection of game theory, multiagent systems and LLMs!
job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/job...

Research Engineer, Game Theory & Multi-Agent Systems

London, UK

job-boards.greenhouse.io

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Reposted

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 20d

🚨NEW: For the first time in history, the single largest group of people arrested in the interior and sent to ICE detention is people with NO criminal record.

As of yesterday's data release, 40%(!) of those arrested in the interior and detained by ICE had no prior conviction or pending charges.

Chart shows Detention Population, Among Those Arrested by ICE in the Interior, by Criminal Record. The chart shows three lines; Prior conviction, pending criminal charges, and no criminal record. From 2019 through September 2025, the largest group is people with criminal convictions, with much further down people with pending charges. But starting in January, those without criminal records spikes dramatically. In July it crossed pending charges and in the latest data it jumps above criminal convictions.

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Reposted

Thomas Serre @thomasserre.bsky.social · 23d

Brown’s Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working in the area of AI and the Mind (start July 1, 2026). Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939

#AI #CognitiveScience #AcademicJobs #BrownUniversity

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · 23d

the truth is we have a terrible education system so we leave people unequipped with the ability to think critically about these things

the USA has made this mess with how it treats public education

the good news: better public education is bipartisan

the bad news: its not a priority for elites

Reposted

Momchil Tomov @momchiltomov.bsky.social · 28d

Excited to share a new preprint based on my work this past year:

**TreeIRL** is a novel planner that combines classical search with learning-based methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance in simulation and in **real-world autonomous driving**! 🚘 🤖 🚀

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Reposted

Kempner Institute at Harvard University @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social · Sep 15

How can scientists apply efficient #AI tools to cognitive science? And what does it mean for how robots learn in new environments? #KempnerInstitute fellow Wilka Carvalho (@cogscikid.bsky.social l) + collaborators outline a new framework in 3 papers.
Read more: bit.ly/47Fk9F9
#NeuroAI

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 10

If you're interested in learning more

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2507.05561

Project page: cogscikid.com/preplay

Code + Data: github.com/KempnerInsti...

Preemptive Solving of Future Problems: Multitask Preplay in Humans and Machines

Humans can pursue a near-infinite variety of tasks, but typically can only pursue a small number at the same time. We hypothesize that humans leverage experience on one task to preemptively learn solu...

arxiv.org

cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 10

Excited to share recent work on an AI model that doubles as a scalable cognitive theory.

Basic idea: when learning one task, "preplay" other tasks to learn implicit goal-oriented maps that support fast performance later.

This improves AI and predicts human behavior in naturalistic experiments!

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 9

1/2 the problem is demand-driven labor/"jobs"

the other half is picking skills to grow in

UBI (as your article points out) can give the breathing room for growth

but the space of skills to learn (and the economic "demands" for lab) will be vast and opaque

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 9

Love the question.

"jobs" where people contribute to society are one way people commonly get "purpose"

I assume that a world with a dramatically different labor market will be one where people will need to reimagine how they contribute to society

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 8

fair. that's an important part of the social welfare solution.

cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 8

bearish on UBI unless it's coupled with a tool to help people find activities that give them meaning/purpose

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 8

So when we need to incorporate this knowledge into decision-making, there really is no replacing humans

cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 8

Even in conversation, we constantly use knowledge we can't explain. Sensing emotional undercurrents in someone's voice. Knowing when to pause. Feeling when someone needs encouragement versus honesty.

Right now, LLMs have little to no access to this knowledge

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 8

Same with dancing - the rhythm in your body, reading your partner's movements. Or coffee tasting - not just "bitter" or "smooth," but the complex flavors that build a sommelier's expertise.

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 8

How do you teach ice skating through text? "Bend your knees, shift forward, arms out for balance." But what about the feel of the blade catching ice? The micro-adjustments your body makes? The sensation of momentum?

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 8

A limitation of LLMs: tacit knowledge---the knowledge you can't put into words

LLMs have all the world's written knowledge. But many important things were never written down.

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cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · Sep 3

maybe me?

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Reposted

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · Sep 3

Gotta celebrate the good news when it happens!

The Associated Press @apnews.com · Sep 3

BREAKING: A federal judge reverses the Trump administration's cut of billions of dollars to Harvard University.

Judge reverses Trump administration's cuts of billions of dollars to Harvard University

A federal judge in Boston has ordered the reversal of the Trump administration’s cuts to more than $2.6 billion in funding research grants for Harvard University. U.S.

bit.ly

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