Very excited to finally make this public: I will be joining EPFL in the summer of 2023 to establish a research group focused on brain-like models of vision and language, and potential applications of these models. My appointment has been confirmed by the ETH Rat today.
The focus of my group will be:
- Building better (= more behaviorally and neurally aligned) models of vision and language. To build these models, we will use neural recordings from non-human primates and humans as well as human behavioral benchmarks, from the Brain-Score platform [perspective paper, technical paper, CORnet model, VOneNet model, language paper].
- Integrating multimodal representations: I think there is a lot of power in shared invariant representations; creating models that go all the way from pixel input to downstream language representations would allow us to potentially harness shared representations between these two domains, and test if we can better map such a model onto brain hierarchy.
- Towards clinical translation: in my mind, one of the end goals of these brain-modeling efforts is to apply them and improve people’s lives. This could involve helping blind patients (preliminary work), or people with dyslexia.
I will be hiring at all levels, please get in touch if these topics sound interesting to you.