🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social
We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked
What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective
We call it the digital sphinx
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Alt metric score of 1300
I guess our paper hit a bit of a nerve 👀
@olivia.science, @marentierra.bsky.social et al. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We then integrated SETs into a Structurally Enriched Trajectory Learning and Encoding (SETLE) architecture that incorporates a heterogeneous graph-based memory structure with multi-level relational dependencies, essential for task generalisation.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
4/4
Here we go doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
A representational framework for learning and encoding structurally enriched trajectories in complex agent environments
@corinacatarau.bsky.social, @e-mondragon.bsky.social
@ealonso.bsky.social
Neural Networks, Available online 19 March 2026
Cheers!
Because there is AI beyond LLMs and generative AI
arxiv.org/abs/2503.13194
arxiv.org/abs/2602.07519
New preprint and simulator of associative learning attentional models. Have fun! 👁️
arxiv.org/abs/2602.07519
cal-r.org/index.php?id...
#simulation #associative_learning #attention
Also, including me.
We are demanding that EU co-legislators reject attempts in the AI Omnibus to remove a key transparency safeguard from the AI Act.
We cannot open a loophole that would let providers exempt themselves from the AI Act’s high risk requirements with no transparency www.accessnow.org/press-releas...
Table 1 A non-comprehensive list of different (not mutually exclusive) meanings of the word Al, including Al as idea, Al as a type of system, Al as a field of study, and Al as institution(al unit).
The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) means many things to many people (see Table 1). (...) One meaning of ‘AI’ that seems often forgotten these days is one that played a crucial role in the birth of cognitive science as an interdiscipline in the 1970s and ’80s." 2/n
This is NOT what AI was about
"What can researchers do if they suspect that their manuscripts have been peer reviewed using artificial intelligence (AI)?"
This -> "We have deprived the youth of the joys of discovery, the thrill to feel yourself close to an answer, and the wonderful, rewarding feeling of a moment of lucidity after hard work."
Perhaps of interest to some of you.
"Quick societal adoption of tools often reflects a demand driven by business interests or culture. Reflecting on generative AI, especially Large Language Models, I believe there is a strong lifestyle generation component that nurtures..
cal-r.org/mondragon/S8...
Ablation study and resulting optimal architecture that considerably improves recent research on CNN-Hebbian learning integration with competition mechanisms.
with @julian-jn.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Surprise, surprise. Here we go.
“The European Commission is proposing a pause to parts of its landmark artificial intelligence laws amid intense pressure from Big Tech companies and the US government.”
www.ft.com/content/af6c...
✨ This is wonderful 🎬 🍿
Librebel on Youtube reads out our position paper:
Guest, O., Suarez, … & van Rooij, I. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJNO... @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social
“Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function(…) automation of knowledge and culture by private companies is a worrying prospect – conjuring dystopian and outright fascistic scenarios.” — @olivia.science
A quick summary for busy people:
We propose a mathematical framework for learning representations by extracting the algebra of transformations of worlds from the agent's perspective.
1/n
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Some pictures of this enlightening event organised by @hcid.city and @citai.bsky.social
I am pleased to announce that this paper has been accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence (AIJ)! 😊
arxiv.org/abs/2310.01536
New version available. The readability of the paper has been greatly improved. Enjoy!
arxiv.org/abs/2310.01536
Did you all know that Margaret Boden founded the first School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences in 1987.
No?
Well, now you do 😌
Btw, listen to this great talk by her. I'll be adding this to the resources from our 1st year students in Intro to AI.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRA...
Inaugural Lecture of the Margaret Boden Lecture series at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNr2...
Those who were lucky to know her personally can only share her defence of the university as the place for fundamental and speculative research and debate and her commitment to challenge powers-that-be.
🌸
2/2
Sad news. RIP Maggie Boden.
Maggie was an AI pioneer and a truly interdisciplinary scholar, integrating in her work philosophy, psychology, and computer science -worth emphasising in an era of massive, data-hungry GenAI architectures.
1/n
staff.sussex.ac.uk/news/article...
You are invited to a one-day multidisciplinary conference on the future of comics, technology, and creativity. Abstracts (200 words) + bios (100 words) due: 10 July 2025. Don’t miss this opportunity to rethink comics and AI with a multidisciplinary community! #CFP: comicsandai.org #ComicsStudies
