Thinking About Thinking is a nonprofit organization bringing together researchers, policymakers, and builders to engage with the most important open problems shaping artificial intelligence.

I’m pleased to share that I've been selected as a Fellow of the 2026 Thinking About Thinking Program! I’m grateful to join a global, research-led ecosystem engaging thoughtfully with how AI is developed, governed, and understood. @geometric-intel.bsky.social @ai-ucsb.bsky.social

Proud of our faculty, students, and the culture of excellence they've built. Go Gauchos! 💙💛 #UCSB

As Dean Umesh Mishra puts it: "These results affirm what we see every day at UC Santa Barbara: research that is not only prolific and impactful, but profoundly influential" 🗣️ Read more below👇🔗 bit.ly/4kAsRZF

Across Engineering and Physical Sciences, our numbers are staggering: Top 1%: #1 U.S. Public (#7 Worldwide)🥇 Top 10%: #1 U.S. Public (#11 Worldwide)🥇 Top 50%: #1 U.S. Public (#14 Worldwide)🥇 Consistency is our baseline. 🌊🔬

The CWTS Leiden Rankings measure how often research is cited by other scientists. In the "Top 1%" category (the most elite tier), UCSB ranks #3 in the U.S. overall, trailing only MIT and Harvard.📈✨

🏆UCSB ranked #1 public university in the US for scientific impact, and 3rd in universities overall!🎓 Congratulations to all of our researchers who are leading the global conversation.🌐🧵 @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social @ucsbengineering.bsky.social @uofcalifornia.bsky.social

Love to see it from @fatihdinc.bsky.social 😼🐼 Looking forward to seeing future talks from @ai-ucsb.bsky.social @ucsbece.bsky.social

We’re excited to kick off this year’s REAL AI Seminar Series! 🤖✨ Thrilled to start with @fatihdinc.bsky.social , thanks for joining us to launch the series. Dr. Fatih Dinc gave a wonderful talk on biological versus artificial neural networks 🤯 @ucsbece.bsky.social @geometric-intel.bsky.social

If you are passionate about shaping the next generation of global tech leaders and want to run a program at the intersection of world-class research and professional excellence, we want to hear from you!

We are looking for a visionary leader to serve as the inaugural Executive Director for this first-of-its-kind program @ucsbengineering.bsky.social @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social. lnkd.in/gbe5fhHU

Designed for early/mid career tech professionals, METL bridges the gap btw deep technical expertise & strategic business leadership. Fall 2026: Specialized tracks in Semiconductor Technology & Technology Management. Fall 2027: Quantum Information & AI for Science and Technology.

Exciting News! 🎓✨ Our new online professional master’s program—the Master of Engineering and Technology Leadership (METL)—is launching in Fall 2026: We Are Hiring its Executive Director! Join us in building the future of engineering @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social: lnkd.in/gbe5fhHU

Winter Quarter is here @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social but the classroom has changed. How do we teach and learn when AI tools think & write faster? GI Lab's PhD @abbybertics.bsky.social explores innovation vs academic integrity in a podcast #TheEconomist also featuring PI @ninamiolane.bsky.social 🎙️👇

Thrilled to share @ninamiolane.bsky.social 's OpEd in @insidehighered.com with Annie K. Lamar! Open-source software and scientific infrastructure fuel discovery by removing barriers – not creating them. Time to start treating open science as the public good it is🔬💡

The way forward is to invest in true open-source software and infrastructure. Read our full oped w/ Annie K. Lamar @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social #publicvoices of TheOpEdProject: insidehighered.com/opinion/view... @geometric-intel.bsky.social @ai-ucsb.bsky.social @ucsbengineering.bsky.social

🙌 To be sure, *some* companies are truly dedicated to open-source. By generously sharing their resources, they have dramatically advanced science. It's time universities do the same.

👩‍🔬 Science advances slowly, across decades. Commercial tools, by contrast, advance quickly through mergers, pivots and quarterly earnings reports. Tethering our infrastructure to private companies is like writing knowledge in disappearing ink.

🦾 If we continue to rent the foundations of our knowledge from private companies, we should not be surprised when the floor gives way beneath us.

💵 Without proper funding structures, essential research tools remain fragile, often maintained by overworked volunteers. Universities must begin funding engineers at competitive salaries and recognizing software development as a legitimate form of scholarship.

👩‍💻 Universities are reluctant to fund software engineers at competitive salaries. A skilled engineer can earn 5x more in industry than in academia, yet most grants deprioritize dedicated engineering roles.

🤔 Much of modern research rests on tools and platforms maintained not by universities or public institutions, but by corporations whose priorities can shift overnight. Knowledge itself is being built on the shifting sand of corporate discretion.

We present graph-based neural surrogates that enable fast and uncertainty-aware emulation of global hybrid-Vlasov simulations via a probabilistic latent-variable model. Data + code are openly available, and compatible with advances happening in data-driven weather prediction!

Are you interested in ML for space/plasma physics? I'll be presenting “Graph-based Neural Space Weather Forecasting” this Saturday at the ML for physics workshop in San Diego @neuripsconf.bsky.social 🚀 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19605 💻 Code: github.com/fmihpc/space... #AI4Science #ML4PS

A special thank you to @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social for the thoughtful article on HerBrain – capturing our mission and the importance of understanding how pregnancy shapes the brain 🧠 tinyurl.com/4939bxu5 #TIMEBestInventions #WomensBrainHealth @ai-ucsb.bsky.social @bowers-wbhi.bsky.social

Huge thanks to S. Kushner L. Pereira @adelemyers.bsky.social @louisacornelis.bsky.social L. Pritschet Sheila S. D. Martin de Blas H. Grotzinger I. Stelzer L. Chrastil K. Casaletto K. Jordan @susanacarmona.bsky.social @magdamartinezga.bsky.social @emilyjacobs.bsky.social 🧠

Really enjoyed this recent interview on my work with the Dodgers and how the @geometric-intel.bsky.social lab prepared me for it! Thank you for having me UCSB⚾️ Check it out here science.ucsb.edu/news/geometr...

Congrats to Sarah Kushner Luís F. Pereira @adelemyers.bsky.social @louisacornelis.bsky.social Laura Pritschet Sheila S. Daniel Martin de Blas Hannah Grotzinger Ina Stelzer Liz Chrastil Kaitlin Casaletto Kaya Jordan @susanacarmona.bsky.social @magdamartinezga.bsky.social @emilyjacobs.bsky.social 🧠

Thrilled to see HerBrain on #TIME Best Inventions of 2025! It shows how the anatomy of the brain changes week-by-week through pregnancy and postpartum 🧠 @geometric-intel.bsky.social @ai-ucsb.bsky.social @bowers-wbhi.bsky.social @neuromaternal.bsky.social !

Rumor has it Mother Nature might be the best AI engineer🌱💡 Come see why at Brass Bear Brewing, Nov 13 @ 6pm. With Dr. Fatih Dinc, we’ll dive into how brains, bots, and biology compute with intelligence

Huge congrats to Simon Mataigne and P.-A. Absil on two new papers out this month! 🎉 Bringing elegant math to life through algorithms on the Stiefel manifold and Riemannian barycenters🌐

The second paper called "On the Approximation of the Riemannian Barycenter" uses the bounds from the above article to compute approximations of the Riemannian barycenter at very low computational cost! link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

The first paper called "Bounds on the geodesic distances on the Stiefel manifold for a family of Riemannian metrics" studies the geometry of the Stiefel manifold to derive simple and insightful bounds on the computationally untractable geodesic distance. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚀We’re recruiting PhD students for 2026! If you’re passionate about uncovering the geometric signatures of intelligence in brains🧠 and AI🤖, we’d love to hear from you! Join us in exploring the computations that power natural and artificial minds. 🌐✨

Details on our research and how to apply to our lab are on our website: gi.ece.ucsb.edu. We hope to hear from you! 👋 @uofcalifornia.bsky.social @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social @ucsbece.bsky.social @ucsb-cs.bsky.social @geometric-intel.bsky.social

From your desk you'll see dolphins, beach volleyball courts, surf spots & more importantly: your colleagues! @adelemyers.bsky.social @mathildepapillon.bsky.social @franciscoacosta.bsky.social @louisacornelis.bsky.social @abbybertics.bsky.social @bariskurtkaya.bsky.social and gi.ece.ucsb.edu/people

You are specifically interested in AI? 👉 Look at the AI Curriculum from the UCSB Real AI Initiative offered within the CS and the ECE departments. ai.ece.ucsb.edu/ai-ucsb @ai-ucsb.bsky.social @ucsbece.bsky.social @ucsb-cs.bsky.social @ucsbengineering.bsky.social

We are physicists, neuroscientists, mathematicians and computer scientists who study intelligence in biological and artificial neural networks and use our findings to build better AI models. 👉 You can join us via UCSB ECE, CS, Math or DYNS PhD programs!

Two more Nobel Prizes at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social , congratulations !!

The UC sets a new world record with 5 Nobel Prizes this year!

We can't wait to see your innovative solutions! Full details on the tasks and data are on our site: 🔗 geometric-intelligence.github.io/topobench/td... #TDLChallenge #AI #ML #TAGinDS

A huge thank you to our partners! 🤝 💰 Cash prizes are sponsored by the brilliant team at Arlequin AI. 🏛️ Internships are hosted by the world-class UC Santa Barbara @geometric-intel.bsky.social and EPFL IMOS labs.

Prizes, research gigs, and a chance to twist data into new shapes with topology + ML? 👾 Count me in for the Topological Deep Learning Challenge 2025! 🌀 Who else is ready to expand the data universe?

Diving into topological deep learning🌀? Check out TopoBench — a unified framework for rigorous benchmarking of TDL models. Pleased to share it has been accepted to DMLR! Code & paper: geometric-intelligence.github.io/TopoBench/

Struggling with reproducible benchmarks in TDL? We’ve got you covered. 12+ models tested on 22+ diverse, cross-domain datasets. Tutorials to get you started with topology & higher-order homophily Webpage/Docs: geometric-intelligence.github.io/TopoBench/

Curious about topological liftings? TopoBench lets you experiment with them on your own data! We’ve included 20+ liftings from last year’s TDL Challenge @TAGinDS, @PyT_Team_. Explore them all in our Wiki: github.com/geometric-in... #TDA

At its core, TopoBench is a framework for robust and fair evaluation in TDL. We’re empowering researchers and practitioners to compare models with confidence and push the field forward, together.

For a deep dive into our framework for reproducible benchmarking, our methodology, and key findings, check out the full paper. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/246.06642 #MachineLearning #GNN #DataScience

This was a massive team effort! Developed & led by @levtelyatnikov.bsky.social , @gbg141.bsky.social , Theodore Papamarkou. With major contributions from @Marco Montagna, Mustafa Hajij, Ghada Zamzmi, Michael T. Schaub, @ninamiolane.bsky.social , & @sscardapane.bsky.social , and many others!

We can’t wait to see what the community builds with TopoBench! Star our repo, read the paper, and bring reproducibility to your TDL research. Contributions and feedback are welcome! #OpenSource #Python #AcademicTwitter