Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی
Postdoctoral researcher @NeuroSpin | AI 🤖 & neuroscience 🧠 enthusiast
linktr.ee/alirezakr
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیPreventing data leakage in neural decoding - "for autocorrelated neural time series, standard k-fold cross-validation can dramatically overstate performance." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیPostdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻 Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems. See below for + details and retweet 🙏
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیFor the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیWant to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی🎓Fully-funded PhD studentship in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience!!! Join @seanfw.bsky.social and myself at @tcddublin.bsky.social for a PhD at the intersection of cutting-edge cognitive neuroscience (OPM-MEG) and neuro-AI. 🗓 Deadline: 5 Feb 2026 #neurojobs #neuroscience #compneuro
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیVoxelwise Encoding Models (VEMs) are a great framework for modeling fMRI data, but it can be difficult to implement. We've made VEM accessible by providing software, tutorials and reviews that guide its use an implementation. Get it here: gallantlab.org/blog/2025-12... #neuroscience, #neuroimaging
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیWe're running a 5th edition of the always-exciting UCL Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition this year, 8th-10th July 2026 in London. Accommodation and travel expenses are covered. For more information and how to apply, check out metacoglab.org/summer-schoo...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی15 fully funded PhD positions in EU-funded Doctoral Network (IndiBrain). We lead Project 7 (@spinozacentre.bsky.social, @nin-knaw.bsky.social): biologically inspired models of individual observers combining 7T MRI + MEG, focusing on vision and recurrent processing. 4-year PhD. Apply: indibrain.eu
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی📢 Applications open on 19 Jan for the 7-week #Mathematics #SummerSchool in London. You will develop the maths skills and intuition necessary to enter the #TheoreticalNeuroscience / #MachineLearning field. Find out more & register for the information webinar 👉 www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیI have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی"Simple heuristics to run a research group" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیIt isn't easy following science as a career path. Our series of personal essays, published on the last page of Science, aim to shed light on the challenges scientists face and, hopefully, help others feel less alone. Here are @science.org's top essays of the year. www.science.org/content/arti...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیMultidisciplinary training, over time, produces the highest impact people www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیExcited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیIf you analyse time-resolved data (M/EEG, iEEG, pupillometry, force recordings…) and feel limited by cluster-based permutation tests (CBPTs); especially when trying to determine when an effect starts or ends; you may want to try our new R package: lnalborczyk.github.io/neurogam/ #rstats #brms #EEG
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیPrediction: task-based optimization will ultimately prove to have a relatively minor role in DNN models of the ventral stream. Although tasks (including self-supervised ones) are currently crucial, there are signs that a simpler approach is possible. A thread:
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی“Why AGI Will Not Happen” by Tim Dettmers. timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/w... This essay is worth reading. Discusses diminishing returns (and risks) of scaling. The contrast between West and East: “Winner takes all” approach of building the biggest thing vs a long-term focus on practicality.
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیExcited to announce our symposium on how AI and humans shape each other “Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual Influences” 9 Jan at ENS Paris. Talks by @smfleming.bsky.social, Valeria Giardino, Silvia Tulli, @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Laurence Devillers & @summerfieldlab.bsky.social . Program ↓
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیWe recently stumbled upon a surprisingly common misunderstanding in computing noise ceilings that can be quite consequential. So if you care about noise ceilings, please check out Sander’s thread and our preprint! 👇
- New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیNew today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیNew work with @simyciri.bsky.social. Adults make more accurate decisions than adolescents—yet show more intrusion from irrelevant players. We explain this paradox via efficient information compression: adults rely on combinatorial social basis functions that use group structure as a mental scaffold.
- 🥳!!NEW PREPRINT!!🥳 We show that the tendency to compress complex social information into priors about social structures becomes more pronounced during adolescence. osf.io/preprints/ps... I am soooooo excited to share this work, together with @mkwittmann.bsky.social and @yongling.bsky.social.
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیY’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیNoise ceilings are really useful: You can estimate the reliability of your data and get an index of how well your model can possibly perform given the noise in the data. But, contrary to what you may think, noise ceilings do not provide an absolute index of data quality. Let's dive into why. 🧵
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیI’m looking for interns to join our lab for a project on foundation models in neuroscience. Funded by @ivado.bsky.social and in collaboration with the IVADO regroupement 1 (AI and Neuroscience: ivado.ca/en/regroupem...). Interested? See the details in the comments. (1/3) 🧠🤖
- I think “Academia = papers” vs. “Science = helping society” is too simplistic. Science isn’t always about direct utility; sometimes its value is understanding itself. And academia isn’t defined by papers — that’s just the current incentive system.
- An exciting opportunity to work with @martinhebart.bsky.social
- Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026. The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social. Please apply here until Nov 25: www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیWhen does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com Work with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @tsonj.bsky.social, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- New preprint out with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social! When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge? We compare continual learning in humans and artificial neural networks, revealing similar patterns of transfer & catastrophic interference (1/8) osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیFor your enjoyment (by @jagarikin)
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیFrom ancient Greece to the Arabic golden age, scholars have been driven by their curiosity to investigate astronomy, history, philosophy, and sundry other disciplines. Is there a structure to that curiosity? Are astronomers as likely to also be historians or to also be philosophers?
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی📣 Apply now for the 🌵CaCTüS 3-month fully funded internship in Germany in 2026! Work on ML, theor. neuroscience, computational psychiatry, behavioral experiments or data analysis at a top institution in Tübingen. For students facing barriers in higher education. 👉 cactus-internship.tuebingen.mpg.de
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیTen Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science arxiv.org/abs/2510.22254 - our latest, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe 1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning? In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیI am close to tears; they listened and made an english version apache.be/2025/10/24/b... @apache.be you rule 🖤
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیHow does our brain excel at complex object recognition, yet get fooled by simple illusory contours? What unifying principle governs all Gestalt laws of perceptual organization? We may have an answer: integration of learned priors through feedback. New paper with @kenmiller.bsky.social! 🧵
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Interesting PhD positions in AI & ML with the ELLIS–Max Planck AI Network. Potential opportunities for interdisciplinary projects bridging AI and neuroscience.
- 🚀 ELLIS partners with the newly launched 𝗠𝗮𝘅 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗸 𝗔𝗜 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 to expand doctoral opportunities across Europe. Fully funded PhDs with dual supervision: one advisor in ML/AI, one in an application domain, with optional ELLIS co-advisors. 📅 Oct 1-31 🔗 ellis.eu/news/ellis-p... @maxplanck.de
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیVariance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیI wanted to add some thoughts to this excellent blog post, not detailed, maybe wrong, maybe useful: 1. Unique variance is easy to interpret as a lower bound of what a variable explains (the upper bound being either what the variable explains alone or what the other variables cannot explain uniquely)
- Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی
I’m recruiting committee members for the Technical Program Committee at #CCN2026. Please apply if you want to help make submission, review & selection of contributed work (Extended Abstracts & Proceedings) more useful for everyone! 🌐 Helps to have: programming/communications/editorial experience.- Fill out the form here to be involved in #CCN2026 tinyurl.com/ccn26committee And definitely fill out the #CCN2025 feedback form! tinyurl.com/ccn25partici...
- Thrilled that #CCN2026 will be hosted at NYU! Having experienced an amazing summer school there last year, I know how inspiring the city is. It’s heartbreaking, though, that many brilliant Iranian students and researchers may be excluded due to the new travel restrictions.
- The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!
- Come and check out our poster at #CCN2025, presented by @tlmnhut.bsky.social
- Missed #CCN2025 this year, but still excited to share two works there! 1️⃣ From my PhD with @manpiazza.bsky.social — accepted in the CCN proceedings. My young collaborator @tlmnhut.bsky.social will be presenting it. It’s about numerosity representation in CNNs. 📄 tinyurl.com/yc2dyhm3
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیNew preprint out! We propose that action is a key dimension shaping the topographic organization of object categories in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC)—and test whether standard and topographic neural networks capture this pattern. A thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Missed #CCN2025 this year, but still excited to share two works there! 1️⃣ From my PhD with @manpiazza.bsky.social — accepted in the CCN proceedings. My young collaborator @tlmnhut.bsky.social will be presenting it. It’s about numerosity representation in CNNs. 📄 tinyurl.com/yc2dyhm3
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیLooking for a Master internship and interested in timing the interplay between timing and hearing? 🔽 brainthemind.com/openings/
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیIf you are in Paris on October 1-3 : we are organizing a fantastic cognitive neuroscience conference at Collège de France, on topics ranging from language to math, education and consciousness, with many of my favorite scientists ! Full program here: www.unicog.org/seeing-the-m...
- New paper out in @commsbio.nature.com! @elicastaldi.bsky.social, Evelyn Eger, @manpiazza.bsky.social 🔢 We reveal how the brain represents numerosity across the entire visual system, from early visual areas to high-level association cortices. 👇 A thread 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s42...
- Why care about numerosity? Numerosity perception is a core cognitive skill: • Present early in development • Shared across species • Thought to scaffold formal math learning Yet, where and how the brain encodes it independently of other visual features has remained debated.
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمی[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیNew article out featuring CIMeC researchers Alireza Karami and Manuela Piazza, in collaboration with Elisa Castaldi and Evelyn Eger! @alirezakr.bsky.social, @manpiazza.bsky.social Read more 👇🏻 www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08395-z
- This study reveals distinct neural codes for visual numerosity across the brain, showing that numerosity is independently represented from early visual areas to higher-level regions along both dorsal and ventral streams. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
- Reposted by Alireza Karami | علیرضا کرمیThis study reveals distinct neural codes for visual numerosity across the brain, showing that numerosity is independently represented from early visual areas to higher-level regions along both dorsal and ventral streams. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
