This is unbelievable. How can a country that cares about the future begrudge $300 million to unlock the secrets of the mind and cure the most devastating ailments of the soul? This is 0.0035% of the federal budget. If you make 100k a year, this works out to $3.50. A coffee to…

If you are at #CNS2024 - come to our prosody symposium on Tuesday 1:30-3:30pm! with: Maya Inbar, Anna Seydell-Greenwald, Dr. Srishti Nayak 🇮🇳🇸🇬🇨🇦🇺🇲🏳️‍🌈

For friends in the US, and for those of us that have BRAIN grants, this is terrible news. Read below on how we can collectively try to help ⬇️

Excited to be at #CNS2024 in gorgeous Toronto! If you’re also here, be sure to catch our symposium on Tuesday at 1:30 on “Leveraging social cognitive neuroscience tools to characterize heterogeneity in autism” with Gabriela Rosenblau Dorit Kliemann and Dr. Caroline Charpentier!

The Martinos Center is seeking postdoctoral candidates for the MARTINOS FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM! Learn more and apply here: bit.ly/49YKQD2

There's a pattern that predicts who does well on IQ tests: people who spend more time on hard problems.

New work w/ Sam Cheyette extends a 40 year old finding about the role of effort in IQ testing, showing why these tests aren't bare measures of 'intelligence.'

1/10 In April of 2020, weeks into the shutdown, Halie Olson, John Gabrieli, and I initiated an email conversation under the subject “A bad idea”—which, by the end, was optimistically reworded to “Not a bad idea.”🧵

Two papers!

Can visual grounding help LMs learn more efficiently?
1. We show that algs like CLIP don't learn language better (t.ly/eQHA9)
2. We then propose a new one, LexiContrastive Grounding, which does! (t.ly/KB818)

Code: t.ly/C0wu-
🧵

I also want to mention that this work couldn't have been possible without the help of the amazing RAs in EvLab: Colton Casto(now grad student), Alexander Fung, Sara Swords, NiharikaJhingan, HeeSoKim. Thank you!

Really excited about this review!

So excited to see this out!

A common pushback of this framework is that our view of language is too narrow; don’t people need speech and reasoning and world knowledge to actually use language? A comment below 🧵 1/