📢Preprint alert! In recent years, a lot of effort has been put into developing machine-learned models of road user behaviour, mainly motivated by use cases in automated driving - but what if we instead put these models to use to predict road safety in human traffic? 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2606.12500

I had a great time, thanks a lot @rodmurraysmith.bsky.social and team for inviting me. A lovely community and a lovely event - I’ll be back!

Really looking forward to this event - thanks for the invite!

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Currently experiencing a quantum superposition of joy and grief: I know that the decision about my funding application has been made, but I am yet to be informed of the outcome 🎉😭🧪

all academic applications should have consolation prizes. doesn’t have to be much, like a mug that says “i applied for leverhulme 2020” or a t-shirt “UKRI reject 2023”

🚨 New paper at #NeurIPS2025! A systematic fixation-level comparison of a performance-optimized DNN scanpath model and a mechanistic cognitive model reveals behaviourally relevant mechanisms that can be added to the mechanistic model to substantially improve performance. 🧵👇

Received sort of promising reviews for a grant, so there’s a small chance I’ll have some positive news by Christmas, and suddenly I find myself *very* capable of empathising with my 10yo when he’s obsessing and anxious over whether he’ll get his wishes from Santa 🎅😱🧪

🥳 Cool new paper by Siwei Ma, where evidence acc models and EEG data tell the same story: the effects of being cognitively loaded while deciding whether to cross the street can be understood as making us less sensitive to the available perceptual evidence 🧪🧠📈 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨Preprint! Yueyang Wang is bringing his human behaviour modelling out of the VR lab, showing that by constraining deep multi-agent RL with human-like perceptual and motor limitations, a very small real-world dataset is sufficient to outperform a behaviour cloning baseline arxiv.org/abs/2510.27383

It is my pleasure to share that in 2028, we will be hosting the 9th International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP9). Exciting times ahead, we can’t wait to welcome you! @markkula.bsky.social, @hfs-its-leeds.bsky.social, @envleeds.bsky.social, @universityofleeds.bsky.social

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New publication 📢 "Testing the Validity of Multiparticipant Distributed Simulation for Understanding and Modeling Road User Interaction" led by Amir Hossein Kalantari together with Yi-Shin Lin, Ali Mohammadi, Natasha Merat OBE, and @markkula.bsky.social. Access: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...

I love this experience-sampling study on the absolute pitch of earworms! It's a really nicely done study conducted in everyday settings. The link to this paper (open access) is provided below. It is also featured in a podcast (tinyurl.com/4ydrw5zp) by the Psychonomic Society. Congrats!

Oh so it does have phd level intelligence

When your city has an open data portal with the location of every tree, you can do this:

i wrote about what it feels like to live in the collapse of the american empire "a flake of shale in a great upheaval of the earth" buttondown.com/theswordandt...

I am privileged to announce the publication of the Anti-Autocracy Handbook: sks.to/autocracy 1/12

I’ve never been fully into neither chess nor boxing, but I’ve just learned of the existence of what seems like the perfect sport so now maybe I have to! Invented by Enki Bilal no less en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_b...

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

Willie Brown Middle School is a San Francisco 6-8 in the Bayview District. For the entire ‘24-‘25 school year, I have been driving the 44 O’Shaughnessy bus that stops there right after school gets out. That trip has been the busiest and most challenging part of my working day.

Excited to present our study in ‪@natneuro.nature.com‬: a deep brain pathway that triggers safety-driven movement—overriding needs like finding food or social contacts. A look into how the brain weighs deep instincts. Congrats to all and first author @nkrauth.bsky.social. shorturl.at/toYFN

New Substack post It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

Haha the reverse mullet theory of academic publishing

Great post, and can definitely be read as film noir voiceover in places

If you’re not reading Talia Lavin’s wonderful series about sandwiches, you should totally start.

Folks, always share your code. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be helpful. And if you feel that it’s still too messy or not sufficiently clean to be shared, you shouldn’t submit yet. After all, there could be mistakes in your mess.

Our @nature.com paper is out! Bringing together 2 major theories of consciousness - Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) - in an unprecedented collaboration. Here’s the story of how we advanced theory testing in neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 PhD opportunity with our lovely group in Leeds! Models of human behaviour are essential for developing/testing automated vehicles, but how do we know that these human models are *good enough*? Fully funded, open to all nationalities, apply by May 31! 🚶🚴🚗🤖🧠📈🧪 phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/2244...

Amazing days at Champalimaud Neuroscience @champalimaudr.bsky.social in Lisbon, discussing how animals, humans, and human road users do sensorimotor control. Super smart super friendly people, and my reading list has exploded. 😅Thanks so much for the invite Alfonso Renart and colleagues!

This resonates, good thread overall But it’s maybe not only about not wanting to think, but also a worry of not being able to think well enough, and mitigating that worry by outsourcing the thinking to something which sounds smarter and more confident than you feel

A putative neural correlate of mood! One big (scandalous?) idea, simple analyses, and the STRONGEST brain/behavior correlation I've EVER seen (which is shocking, given that it's mood). Work with: You-Ping Yang, @catrinahacker.bsky.social and Veit Stuphorn. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The three stages of responding to referee comments: Draft 1: letting it rip. Draft 2: removing all the rip. Draft 3: adding a dash of courteous language that would not be out of place in the gentile drawing rooms of Bridgerton.

While the world burns, we cook up a new preprint! doi.org/10.1101/2025... Biophysical modeling is a key tool to derive mechanistic insights into the brain. These models are governed by biologically meaningful parameters (unlike artificial neural networks), but the dirty secret ... 1/N

We show that eye-movements are selected based on effort minimization - finally final in @elife.bsky.social eLife's digest: elifesciences.org/digests/9776... & the 'convincing & important' paper: elifesciences.org/articles/97760 I consider this my coolest ever project! #VisionScience #Neuroscience

Excited to share new publication, “Cyclists’ interactions with professional and non-professional drivers: Observations and game theoretic models”, led by Ali mohammadi, with co-authors Amir Hossein Kalantari, our own @markkula.bsky.social, and Marco Dozza. doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

I guess this is the right moment for this again (sigh…) digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/...

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS FOR THE COMMODORE 64 (Source.)

In the physical world, almost all information is transmitted through traveling waves -- why should it be any different in your neural network? Super excited to share recent work with the brilliant @mozesjacobs.bsky.social: "Traveling Waves Integrate Spatial Information Through Time" 1/14

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Folks waiting for the AI in education bubble to pop have their head in the sand. This isn't coming top down, this is bottom up from the students. Helping students figure out how to not let AI usage harm their learning is now critical. Some things I've been trying below, curious for other ideas:

If you've ever wanted to learn how the transformer architecture in general or latent multi-head attention works, here's an excellent visual explainer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VLA...

👇 Awesome post. Sometimes I feel we should drop conventional scientific publication and all just (“just”) write beautiful blog posts like this one instead

This is a canary in the mine for real-world automation. With little time to think about safety or responsibility, desperate people reach for robots. And remember that autonomous systems are never autonomous... www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

#ReinforcementLearning (Barto&Sutton) wins the Turing! Wonderful recognition for two personal heroes of mine as well as for the whole field! www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/t...

Yup. But even complete knowledge of every conceivable microscopic detail down to the quantum level wouldn't tell us "how the brain works". This is one of the lessons of the research on artificial neural networks: we know all parameters already, but understanding still eludes us. 🧵

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

When I have parallelised my code

The Trump admin is causing chaos in transport research. Studies have been canceled, datasets have vanished, and experts have been fired. The Nat'l Academies’ Transportation Research Board has caved to Trump’s demands for censorship, triggering upheaval. Its future is in doubt. From me (w/scoops) 🧵