Kempner Institute Accelerator Awards - Kempner Institute The Kempner Institute Accelerator Awards provide Kempner AI Cluster access to faculty across Harvard University working to understand the nature of intelligence in natural and artificial systems.   We...

📢 Applications for the Kempner Accelerator Awards are now open to @harvard.edu faculty studying #intelligence!

This in-kind award provides access to the #KempnerInstitute AI cluster, one of the largest academic #AI clusters in the world. 💡

Apply here 👉 bit.ly/4cstDo1

Schematic diagram of Kempner AI Cluster

Ever wondered how we've networked together 1,144 GPUs — including A100s, H100s, H200s, & RTX Pro 6000s — into one of the most powerful academic supercomputers for advancing #AI & #neuroscience research?

Take a closer look at the #KempnerInstitute AI cluster: bit.ly/3QcRb8M

Thanks to all our 4th year grad fellow participants!

@ushabhalla.bsky.social, Ada Fang, Ikechukwu Uchendu, Yongsoo Ra, @rosieyzh.bsky.social, Catherine Yeh, Gustaf Ahdritz, Anat Kleiman, Sabarish Sainathan, Yuyang Zhang & Sonia Murthy.

🧠🤖 Huge shoutout to our incredible 4th-year grad fellows!

On Friday, we hosted the very first #KempnerInstitute Graduate Symposium, where they delivered outstanding presentations on everything from #AI interpretability to #NeuroAI, new algorithms, and real-world applications.

📢 Attention @harvard.edu faculty studying #intelligence! Apply by April 30th to become one of the new #KempnerInstitute Associate Faculty. Join us in building a community devoted to innovation in #AI, #NeuroAI, and #neuroscience. 💡

Learn more & apply 🔗 bit.ly/3Qhes9x

Do You Trust Me? A Framework For Making Networks of Robots and Vehicles Safer Paper describes how 'cy-trust' can enable resilient systems

Trust matters between agents. New work from #KempnerInstitute associate faculty member Stephanie Gil introduces "cy-trust," a quantitative measure of how trustworthy a robot or vehicle is in a networked system.

seas.harvard.edu/news/do-you-...

#AI #robotics @ieeeorg.bsky.social

First page of Kempner Research Roundup for March

NEW: Kempner Research Roundup: March 2026! 🧠🤖

Learn about the latest research on natural and artificial intelligence from the Kempner Institute:

bit.ly/4dlRAiX #AI #NeuroAI #neuroscience

Excited to be working on neural representations as a route to AI interpretability, safety, and alignment. Grateful to the Aramont Foundation for the support!

#MechInterp #AIsafety #AIAlignment

Aramont Fellowships give freedom to concentrate on high-risk, high-reward research — Harvard Gazette Renewed gift significantly expands the impact of early-career support.

Congratulations to #KempnerInstitute Investigator SueYeon Chung on receiving an Aramont Fellowship to advance research linking neural representations, #AIsafety & #AIalignment!

Read more: bit.ly/4rRHqtN

@sueyeonchung.bsky.social @harvardseas.bsky.social
#NeuroAI

Harvard Researchers Create Social Network for “AI Scientists” to Collaborate - Kempner Institute Science rarely advances exclusively through lone researchers. Progress often comes from discussion and collaboration — scientists sharing ideas, questioning one another, and refining their thinking to...

🤖🔬Researchers at the #KempnerInstitute and @harvardmed.bsky.social introduce ClawInstitute — a social network where #AI agents collaborate like scientists.

Read more: bit.ly/4c4Or5M

@marinkazitnik.bsky.social

New AI-based Framework Could Explain Why Evolution Gave So Many Species the Same Smell Circuit - Kempner Institute Why do the smell circuits of flies, mice, and humans look so remarkably alike? A new study from Harvard researchers offers a possible explanation: this shared design may be the […]

🧠👃A new study by #KempnerInstitute associate faculty member Venkatesh Murthy & collaborators shows that maximizing information recreates an olfactory design shared by multiple species.

Out now in @pnas.org: bit.ly/4uQ6Omw

@neurovenki.bsky.social @jzv.bsky.social #neuroscience

Trading places: What happens when neuroscience turns into machine learning, and machine learning turns into neuroscience? Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other. I asked eight experts to weigh in on what...

Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other, writes @gershbrain.bsky.social. Will this bring us closer to understanding neural systems?

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

Authors: Samy Jelassi*, Mujin Kwun*, Rosie Zhao* (@rosieyzh.bsky.social), Yuanzhi Li, Nicolo Fusi (@nfusi.bsky.social), Yilun Du (@yilundu.bsky.social ), Sham M. Kakade (@shamkakade.bsky.social) and Carles Domingo-Enrich*

* Equal contribution

Energy-Based Fine-Tuning: Beyond Next-Token Prediction - Kempner Institute Language models trained with teacher forcing never learn to handle errors that compound during generation. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) fixes this by training on rollouts, but...

NEW from the #KempnerInstitute: researchers introduce Energy-Based Fine-Tuning (EBFT), a method that matches the long-range statistics of model generations to ground-truth sequences in high-dimensional feature spaces.

Read the #DeeperLearning blog post: bit.ly/4ry8FcM #AI

Sunny Lisbon.

In Lisbon for @cosynemeeting.bsky.social 2026!
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
I'm very excited about the following posters, each associated with a preprint.

Just arrived in Lisbon for #COSYNE2026!

Check out what our lab is presenting at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

Looking forward to catching up with friends over the next few days.

☝️Featuring work by @satpreetsingh.bsky.social @sjohnsonyu.bsky.social @andykeller.bsky.social @annhuang42.bsky.social @zachcohen1.bsky.social @bqian.bsky.social @willydorrell.bsky.social @sueyeonchung.bsky.social @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social @nsaphra.bsky.social

🧠🤖 Are you at #COSYNE2026?

Check out the #KempnerInstitute's presentations! 👇

#neuroscience #NeuroAI

Announcing 2026 Kempner Institute Research Fellows - Kempner Institute Cambridge, MA – The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2026 Kempner Institute Research Fellowships. The […]

📢✨We are thrilled to announce the 2026 recipients of #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships: Jieneng Chen, Marco Fumero, Audrey Huang, Raja Marjieh, Yinuo Ren and Anne Wu! Learn more: bit.ly/3NfzB2Y

@jienengchen.bsky.social @marcofm.bsky.social

Massive Increase of Computing Power for Kempner Institute at Harvard - Kempner Institute Cambridge, MA – The most powerful supercomputer at Harvard is about to get larger and faster. Much faster. The Kempner Institute’s AI cluster, already one of the fastest AI supercomputers […]

🚀 Kempner Institute's AI cluster gets a big upgrade! We're adding 424 H200s & 192 RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, creating a 1,144-GPU supercomputer delivering 1.79 exaFLOPS for AI, neuroscience & robotics research.

Read more: bit.ly/4cHmQZs
@shamkakade.bsky.social @blsabatini.bsky.social

Kempner Researchers Harness Generative AI to Reveal What Neurons "Want" - Kempner Institute How can scientists figure out what visual information a neuron really responds to? For decades, neuroscientists have tried to answer this question by showing animals pictures — of faces, trees, […]

🧠What do neurons “want”?✨

Kempner researchers @binxuwang.bsky.social and Carlos Ponce have developed a way for neurons to train AI image models to match their “preferences.”

Read more about the research, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, here: bit.ly/4bz47hw

#neuroscience #NeuroAI

Generalization in Attention-Based Models with Lenka Zdeborová YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University

Thanks to Lenka Zdeborová (@zdeborova.bsky.social) from @epfl-ai-center.bsky.social for a great talk discussing attention-based architectures that operate on sequences, and analytical insights into generalization obtained using solvable high-dimensional models.

Watch the talk ➡️ youtu.be/hECIITnOGho

InputDSA: Demixing then comparing recurrent and externally driven dynamics in complex systems - Kempner Institute We explored how to measure the similarity between two complex systems when they are driven by external inputs, like biological neural circuits or reinforcement learning agents. Our novel method, calle...

NEW from the #KempnerInstitute: InputDSA, a tool to separate intrinsic dynamics from input-driven effects—enabling accurate, efficient comparisons of complex systems with external inputs.

Read the #DeeperLearning blog post by @annhuang42.bsky.social & @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social: bit.ly/4bkrvy9

Kempner Institute Undergraduate Summer Internship Program in AI/ML Research & Engineering  - Kempner Institute The Undergraduate Summer Internship Program in AI/ML Research & Engineering at the Kempner Institute offers a structured opportunity for current undergraduates (interns) and recent graduates to furthe...

Applications for the 2026 #KempnerInstitute Undergraduate Summer #Internship Program in AI/ML Research & Engineering are now open! 👀

This 10-week program offers a structured opportunity to further your experience in AI/ML engineering.

Learn more 🔗 bit.ly/4cxbS8K

📣 Excited to announce the 2nd edition of our workshop
“Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Theory, Autonomy, Embodiment & Environment”
at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #CoSyNe2026!!
🧠🤖🌍🪰🐟🐭💪🧘🏃

🗓️ March 17, 2026
📍 Cascais, Portugal
🔗 Speaker lineup and schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io

Authors: David Clark (@david-g-clark.bsky.social),* Blake Bordelon (@frostedblakess.bsky.social),* Jacob Zavatone-Veth (@jzv.bsky.social),* Cengiz Pehlevan (@cpehlevan.bsky.social).

*Equal contribution

NEW: #Kempner researchers develop a mean-field theory of task-trained RNNs that bridges random and learned connectivity—and find macaque motor cortex is best captured by an intermediate, task-specific recurrent structure.
Read the blog post 👇
🔗 bit.ly/47f3Ldl

Kempner Institute Announces 2026 Accelerator Awards Request for Proposals - Kempner Institute Cambridge, MA– The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University is pleased to announce the 2026 Kempner Institute Accelerator Awards request for proposa...

📢 Request for proposals: Applications for the #KempnerInstitute Accelerator Awards open to @harvard.edu faculty on April 14. Awardees pursue intelligence research on the Kempner #AI cluster, one of the largest academic AI clusters in the world.

Learn more 👉 bit.ly/4smmyeW

What Happens When AI Isn’t Trained, But Evolves? - Kempner Institute Over the past two decades, progress in artificial intelligence has involved a reliable recipe: define a clear goal for an AI system and teach it to improve on that objective […]

What if #AI could emerge through natural selection instead of training?

A new study led by #KempnerInsitute Research Fellow @aaronwalsman.bsky.social shows that environment size & sensory richness are key factors for how intelligence evolves.

Read more here: bit.ly/4b2gKjC

Learning World Models and Agents for High-Cost Environments with Sherry Yang YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University

Thanks to Sherry Yang from @nyucourant.bsky.social and Google DeepMind for a great talk on Friday discussing strategies for building intelligent agents that learn efficiently despite real-world constraints.

Watch the talk 👉 youtu.be/SpNTKghP11Q

#AI #NeuroAI