Tom Wallis
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tsawallis.bsky.social
Tom Wallis
@tsawallis.bsky.social
4.6K followers 1.4K following 270 posts
Vision scientist. Professor at the Centre for Cognitive Science, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. 🇦🇺🇩🇪. pronoun.is/he

https://www.psychologie.tu-darmstadt.de/perception
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tsawallis.bsky.social
Tom Wallis @tsawallis.bsky.social · Nov 10
Welcome new followers (X-iles, Swifties, ... all except Nazis are welcome on my timeline)!

I'm a vision / cognitive scientist studying visual perception in humans and sometimes machines. You can find out more about my lab's work here: www.psychologie.tu-darmstadt.de/perception/h...

#visionscience
Perception
Perception – Somehow, our minds make sense of sensory data in a way that eludes current machine vision systems. We study visual perception in humans using psychophysics and computational models. A sec...
www.psychologie.tu-darmstadt.de
Reposted by Tom Wallis
andrew.heiss.phd
hahahaha just got an email from someone who was using Claude to generate a boilerplate #QuartoPub document and the LLM *used my name* as the author. The computers are literally trying to be me now 😂🤣🙃🫠
A Quarto document in RStudio with the author field set to "Andrew Heiss"
November 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
hurricaneros.bsky.social
It took me a good 30 seconds of staring at this photo to realise that I wasn't absolutely hammered and/or hallucinating. #theashes
A picture of Nathan Lyon where it looks like a helmet is resting on top of a head without a face, but his helmet is actually resting towards the back of his head with his face turned downward. Headline: The Ashes: what you need to know about the 2025-26 series in Australia
November 20, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
betanalpha.bsky.social
Friendly reminder that a few sponsored registrations are still available. Priority given to black, indigenous people of color in high-income countries or those from low and middle-income countries.
betanalpha.bsky.social Michael Boo-tancourt @betanalpha.bsky.social · 3d
Did I tweak nearly every slide of my regression deck in preparation for next month’s charity course? Only one way to find out!

Join us by dropping a 50 USD donation to World Central Kitchen or United Farm Workers. A few sponsored spots available. Details at betanalpha.github.io/courses/.
The title slide for my regression modeling decks, titled “Foundations of Regression Modeling” with a, dare I say elegant, faded image of curves interpolating through observed data in the background.
November 19, 2025 at 5:38 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
nadinedijkstra.bsky.social
Thanks so much @thetransmitter.bsky.social for this Rising Stars of Neuroscience award! 🤩

And a big thank you to @smfleming.bsky.social for the nomination!!
November 18, 2025 at 9:49 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
alelazic.bsky.social
I don't think this science communication resource gets enough love.

OpenMoji offers 4,000+ free, #opensource emojis (CC BY-SA 4.0), with categories for healthcare, climate, UI...

Challenge: find Greta Thunberg and a Viennese coffee house. ☕

🔗 openmoji.org #SciComm #Design
Screenshot of the OpenMoji project homepage. The text says OpenMoji 16.0.0 Open source emojis for designers, developers and everyone else! with a Search emoji box below and a lot of random emojis scattered on the page.
November 18, 2025 at 10:41 AM
tsawallis.bsky.social
Vivian is great; go work with Vivian!
vivianpaulun.bsky.social Vivian Paulun @vivianpaulun.bsky.social · 4d
🚨I am looking for a POSTDOC, LAB MANAGER/TECH and GRAD STUDENTS to join my new lab in beautiful Madison, WI.
We study how our brains perceive and represent the physical world around us using behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods.
paulunlab.psych.wisc.edu
#VisionScience #NeuroSkyence
Skyline of Madison, WI
November 18, 2025 at 6:39 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
This is an amazing opportunity: work with Vivian Paulun
‪@vivianpaulun.bsky.social‬, who has deep insights about perception, and extraordinary skills as an experimentalist and theorist.
vivianpaulun.bsky.social Vivian Paulun @vivianpaulun.bsky.social · 4d
🚨I am looking for a POSTDOC, LAB MANAGER/TECH and GRAD STUDENTS to join my new lab in beautiful Madison, WI.
We study how our brains perceive and represent the physical world around us using behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods.
paulunlab.psych.wisc.edu
#VisionScience #NeuroSkyence
Skyline of Madison, WI
November 17, 2025 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
alexh.bsky.social
Our new preprint! The Acknowledgments problem, and what to do about it.
With @martonkovacs.bsky.social, @pietropollo.bsky.social, @philobolobstime.bsky.social, Losia Lagisz, & Mohammad Hosseini.
November 17, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
neuromelody.bsky.social
BEST DAY EVER!!! The award is called the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications & is run by @nationalacademies.org & @schmidtsciences.bsky.social #scicomm #phdstudent
November 17, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
juliet-turner.bsky.social
POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success
November 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
markhisted.org
Yes. This is another reason why public funding is what we want - why the government should support science with democratic mechanisms of oversight.

Public support means not having to beg toxic billionaires for money.
costasamaras.com Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 5d
the professors in the emails being all chummy with epstein is pathetic and enraging.
bakerdphd.bsky.social Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 8d
There are so many professors/scientists y'all
November 16, 2025 at 2:37 PM
tsawallis.bsky.social
Found out yesterday that the small town where I currently live has an R package named after it!

r-packages.io/datasets/Hag...
Hagelloch dataset
Hagelloch measles data.
r-packages.io
November 16, 2025 at 7:09 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
maddipow.bsky.social
Latest academic hot take: it is gross and inhumane and wrong that obituaries are ever held behind a paywall that publishers profit from
November 12, 2025 at 8:40 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
eikofried.bsky.social
I'm in Sydney until December 15th.

If any tweeps (blueskyers?) are around lets get lunch or coffee!

Also ... if you allow random strangers to join your D&D* group for a few weeks ... pleeeeeeease let me know :)))

___
* or whatever pen & paper y'all are up to
a close up of a feather on a rock with the words `` hello '' written in white letters .
ALT: a close up of a feather on a rock with the words `` hello '' written in white letters .
media.tenor.com
November 12, 2025 at 3:42 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
rjwatt42.bsky.social
A conversation elsewhere has taken me back to the most difficult challenge I ever faced in my work. 26 years ago to the day I got a phone call from a lawyer asking if I would talk to them about being an expert witness in a public inquiry into a fatal train crash at Ladbroke Grove (London).
November 11, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
sbmost.bsky.social
Anyone need a concrete demo of the cocktail party problem? Conan O'Brien can help.
Jon Dore & Rory Scovel Were Double-Booked | CONAN on TBS
YouTube video by Team Coco
www.youtube.com
November 8, 2025 at 7:27 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
echodislocation.bsky.social
Do a postdoc with us in San Francisco! A fellowship slot in vision science, clinical vision, blindness, or rehabilitation is available via a NEI T32 slot: 👇🏼
skeriresearch.bsky.social Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute @skeriresearch.bsky.social · 14d
🚨Postdoc fellowship alert! Applications due Dec. 10🚨
Interested in vision science, accessibility, eye movements, brain plasticity, mobility or related fields? A 1-year #NIH T32-funded opening, extensible contingent on funding, has become available in SKERI’s #postdoc #fellowship program. #neurojobs
Collage of 4 photos: Scientists performing an eye tracking experiment, a participant in an EEG cap being prepared for an experiment, postdoctoral fellows posing with the Peanuts gang at Oracle Park, SKERI scientists smiling for the camera.
November 8, 2025 at 12:14 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
perfors.net
Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.
Slide is titled: You don't need to use LLMs. Science is a process of collaborative meaning making, by which we try to understand the world Even if AI were perfect, we rely on it at our peril — it is not science if we (i.e., humanity as a whole) do not understand and cannot recapitulate all parts of it I very, very rarely use LLMs myself. You can give yourself permission not to. Don’t FOMO yourself into it Conclusion: Don't rely on something you don't understand and can't control If you must use LLMS: 1. Treat them like you would an intern: only use them for things you can easily and thoroughly check 2. Make your process as robust as possible 3. Be aware of your own (human) cognitive biases
November 6, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
edhagen.net
In the long-running Nativism-Empiricism debate, have the impressive successes of AI based on blank slate-ish connectionist architectures dealt a knock-out blow for Empiricism? Is it game over for Nativism? @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social gently pushes back 🧪 philpapers.org/archive/KARA...
Al empiricism: the only game in town? Abstract I offer an epistemic argument against the dominance of empiricism and empiricist-inspired methods in contemporary machine learning (ML) research. I first establish, as many ML researchers and philosophers of ML claim, that standard methods for constructing deep learning networks are best thought of as a kind of empiricism about cognitive architecture. I then argue that, even given the resounding success of contemporary ML models, there are few (if any) strong reasons to interpret their success as ruling out competing nativist approaches to cognitive architecture, especially given the extreme resource capture that empiricist methods have undergone in ML research. If we care about research goals like modeling human cognition or building genuinely rational machines, I argue we have good reason to support a robust competing artificial intelligence (AI) nativist tradition. I show how this argument applies to two recent defenses of Al empiricism in the philosophical literature: Buckner (2023)'s book-length defense of moderate Al empiricism, and Long (2024)'s dilemma argument against Al nativism.
November 5, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
lswisnom.bsky.social
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
November 3, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
alexh.bsky.social
"Scholarly publishing, by contrast, too often feels designed to serve corporate profit margins..
what would it mean to design our infrastructures around the communities that use them, rather than around extractive logics?"
A large fanfiction platform shows the way!
November 1, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
alexh.bsky.social
Someday we'll have acknowledgment citation counts and we can better recognize those who are particularly collegial. The image shows the most frequently-acknowledged people in the journal Psychological Review up to 1999.
(Cronin, Shaw, and La Barre, 2003)
November 2, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
neurograce.bsky.social
For the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!
5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet
AI is more than just chatbots! Learn about how AI can be used to protect biodiversity, fight climate change, and just better understand our planet through 5-minute explainers covering academic papers ...
www.youtube.com
June 20, 2025 at 1:55 AM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
jbakcoleman.bsky.social
You also get the added benefit of being able to apply a continuous decision function rather than a step function like you get with an sesoi. Maybe not huge in psych but in contexts where you can map the effect to cost benefit it goes a long way to push forward uncertainty into decisions.
October 31, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Reposted by Tom Wallis
amwinsor.bsky.social
Can jumping spiders extract implied object shape from motion? Check out our new preprint to find out. Collab with Massimo De Agrò @neuroethology.org

doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Biological point-light displays scanning by the principal eyes of a jumping spider
The semi-rigid structure of bodies forces animals to move in rhythmic patterns shared by all creatures with skeletons, exoskeletons, or limb connections. This pattern, known as biological motion, is i...
doi.org
June 25, 2025 at 9:02 PM