The current direction of AI labs is “we’re building something that’s going to replace you and we have no plan to make sure you’re going to land in a better place, but we’ll make billions.”
The logical reaction is, “shut it down.” Labs need to get serious on addressing labor impacts.
Group photo
Had the pleasure of being an invited speaker at the KAUST Rising Stars in AI Symposium last week. Inspiring to meet such a talented group of fellow rising stars and learn about their exciting work. Thanks to the KAUST team for a wonderful event!
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We’re excited to see creative, rigorous, and unexpected ideas.
Let the challenge begin 🔥
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🏆 In addition to leaderboard winners, we’ll present Outstanding Challenge Report Awards for submissions that are innovative, unusual, or make novel contributions to representational alignment research.
Accepted reports will be compiled into a blog post by the organizers.
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📝 Complete submission = 2 steps:
1️⃣ Submit your list (max 20 models or 1,000 images) to the leaderboard.
2️⃣ Submit a Markdown-formatted Challenge Report on OpenReview describing your approach, analyses, and insights.
⏰ Report deadline: February 26
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📏 Evaluation uses Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) on embeddings from a fixed held-out image set.
You’ll choose from a pre-curated set of models and datasets — but you’re free to use any dataset or metric to guide your search.
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🎯 Two submission tracks:
🔵 Blue Team — Find a set of maximum 20 models with the most aligned representations.
🔴 Red Team — Find a set of maximum 1,000 images that lead to maximally divergent model representations.
🚀 The Re-Align Challenge is now LIVE!
We’re inviting you to explore what properties of vision models and data lead to convergences and divergences in representational alignment.
🔗 Get started: huggingface.co/spaces/repre...
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Happy to share that our paper “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners: Modular Reasoning with Brain-Like Specialization” (aka MiCRo) has been accepted to #ICLR2026!! 🎉
See you in Rio 🇧🇷 🏝️
I also wrote a blog post reflecting on why this project started, how it evolved, and why I believe we often underestimate the power of inspiration.
✍️ Blog: bkhmsi.medium.com/egyptian-res...
If this helps even one person see what’s possible, it’s worth it.
We also added a statistics page visualizing key aspects of the community: academia vs. industry, research areas, positions, etc.
Webpage: egyptians-in-cs.github.io#/en/stats
The website now has much better filtering by subfield, making it easier to explore different areas of Computer Science and discover researchers working on specific topics.
One of the most powerful additions: an interactive map showing where Egyptian researchers are around the world 🌍
It highlights the global Egyptian diaspora, and how widely Egyptian researchers are contributing across the world.
The website now features 262 Egyptian researchers across all of Computer Science — from systems and theory to AI, security, HCI, and more.
What started as a short list became a much broader story about visibility and representation.
Three years ago, I built a website called Egyptians in AI Research. Today, that project has grown into Egyptian Researchers in Computer Science thanks to the help of @mo-mo2025.bsky.social!
I wrote a blog post on how it grew, and why it expanded beyond AI.
🔗 egyptians-in-cs.github.io
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Great to see our "From Language to Cognition" work featured in @mordecwhy.bsky.social's latest piece on language models and the brain. Glad to contribute to the conversation!
www.foommagazine.org/language-mod...
Missed the Re-Align hackathon at ICLR or CCN 2025 — or want more? 🙂 Re-Align is back at ICLR 2026 🚀 Beyond the paper track, we’re launching a persistent shared-task challenge + challenge paper track. Can’t wait to see your creative & critical takes on representational alignment 🔥🥳
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🤝 Re-Align 2026 is made possible by an interdisciplinary team of co-organizers:
@bkhmsi.bsky.social, Brian Cheung, @dotadotadota.bsky.social, @eringrant.me, Stephanie Fu, @kushinm.bsky.social, @sucholutsky.bsky.social, and @siddsuresh97.bsky.social!
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🌟 Joining us at Re-Align 2026 is a fantastic lineup of invited speakers covering ML, neuroscience, and cognitive science:
David Bau, Arturo Deza, @judithfan.bsky.social, @alonaf.bsky.social, @phillipisola.bsky.social, and Danielle Perszyk!
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Building on last year’s hackathon, we’re launching a persistent shared-task challenge to support transparent and reproducible representational alignment research.
⭐ Stay in the loop:
GitHub: github.com/representational-alignment/challenge
Form: forms.gle/EUVCyE9gykQA...
📅 Feb 26, 2026 (AoE)
🎉 Re-Align is back for its 4th edition at ICLR 2026!
📣 We invite submissions on representational alignment, spanning ML, Neuroscience, CogSci, and related fields.
📝 Tracks: Short (≤5p), Long (≤10p), Challenge (blog)
⏰ Deadline: Feb 5, 2026 for papers
🔗 representational-alignment.github.io/2026/
This year was hard, personally and globally, from ongoing visa issues that disrupted my life and may prevent me from achieving one of my dreams, to the state of the world itself.
Still grateful for what I achieved and for everyone who supported me.
Wishing us all a brighter year ahead. ✨
1/ 🌍 How does mixing data from hundreds of languages affect LLM training?
In our new paper "Revisiting Multilingual Data Mixtures in Language Model Pretraining" we revisit core assumptions about multilinguality using 1.1B-3B models trained on up to 400 languages.
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Looking forward to be speaking at IndabaX Sudan on Building Responsible and Ethical LLMs!
📅 Saturday, December 13th
⏰ 2:00 PM (GMT+2)
Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
See you all there! :)
Not attending NeurIPS this year, but very much looking to connect.
I’m seeking a PhD research internship next summer in AI for Science, especially where AI meets brain and cognitive sciences. 🧠
If you’re hiring, I’d love to connect!
bkhmsi.github.io
I finally found time to update the Egyptians in AI Research website, apologies for the delay!
Super excited to share that we now feature 227 incredible Egyptian researchers!! 🤯
Link: bkhmsi.github.io/egyptians-in...
You can learn more about our work here: language-to-cognition.epfl.ch
Thanks to all my co-authors @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @davidtyt.bsky.social, @neurotaha.bsky.social and my advisors @abosselut.bsky.social and @mschrimpf.bsky.social!
On my way to #EMNLP2025 🇨🇳
I’ll be presenting our work (Oral) on Nov 5, Special Theme session, Room A106-107 at 14:30.
Let’s talk brains 🧠, machines 🤖, and everything in between :D
Looking forward to all the amazing discussions!
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🙏 Huge thanks to my incredible co-authors @cndesabbata.bsky.social, @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @eric-zemingchen.bsky.social
and my advisors @mschrimpf.bsky.social and @abosselut.bsky.social!
