Disclaimer xkcd.com/3126/

If you missed us at #cogsci2025, my lab presented 3 new studies showing how efficient (lossy) compression shapes individual learners, bilinguals, and action abstractions in language, further demonstrating the extraordinary applicability of this principle to human cognition! 🧵 1/n

Super excited to have the #InfoCog workshop this year at #CogSci2025! Join us in SF for an exciting lineup of speakers and panelists, and check out the workshop's website for more info and detailed scheduled sites.google.com/view/infocog...

#Workshop at #CogSci2025 Information Theory and Cognitive Science 🗓️ Wednesday, July 30 📍 Pacifica C - 8:30-10:00 🗣️ Noga Zaslavsky, Thomas A Langlois, Nathaniel Imel, Clara Meister, Eleonora Gualdoni, and Daniel Polani 🧑‍💻 underline.io/events/489/s...

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656 And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

Nathaniel Imel, Jennifer Culbertson, @simonkirby.bsky.social & @nogazs.bsky.social: Iterated language learning is shaped by a drive for optimizing lossy compression (Talks 37: Language and Computation 3, 1 August @ 16:22; blurb below) (2/)

This month I'm celebrating a decade (!!) since my first paper was published, which now has over 2,000 citations 🥹 "Deep learning and the information bottleneck principle" with the late, great Tali Tishby ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/713...

🔆 I'm hiring! 🔆 There are two open positions: 1. Summer research position (best for master's or graduate student); focus on computational social cognition. 2. Postdoc (currently interviewing!); focus on computational social cognition and AI safety. sites.google.com/corp/site/sy...

Because we must build good things while we scream about the bad, I have started a "Data for Good" team @data-for-good-team.bsky.social that partners with organizations needing short-term data science help. We have three projects ongoing & will add more as our capacity grows. data-for-good-team.org

Excited to share our new paper "Towards Human-Like Emergent Communication via Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity" direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... @rplevy.bsky.social And looking forward to speaking about this line of work tomorrow at @nyudatascience.bsky.social!

Congratulations to Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto on receiving the Turing Award in recognition of their significant contributions to ML. I also stand with them: Releasing models to the public without the right technical and societal safeguards is irresponsible. www.ft.com/content/d8f8...

New preprint! In arxiv.org/abs/2502.20349 “Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science: Towards generalizable models and theories that capture the full range of natural behavior” we synthesize AI & cognitive science works to a perspective on seeking generalizable understanding of cognition. Thread:

Why do diverse ANNs resemble brain representations? Check out our new paper with Colton Casto, @nogazs.bsky.social , Colin Conwell, Mark Richardson, & @evfedorenko.bsky.social on “Universality of representation in biological and artificial neural networks.” 🧠🤖 tinyurl.com/yckndmjt