iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Egyptians in CS Research now features 300+ researchers. Hoping it inspires students from underrepresented backgrounds by showing them what a path into research can look like. If you know someone missing from the list, nominate them. egyptians-in-cs.github.io

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Greta Tuckute @gretatuckute.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Thanks so much for the fun conversation @wiair.bsky.social ! A pleasure to chat about language, LLMs, and memory--covering some work with @bkhmsi.bsky.social @mschrimpf.bsky.social @michael-lepori.bsky.social @klemenkotar.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @thomashikaru.bsky.social, among others!

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

So do LLMs really think in English? 🤔 Turns out it depends on how you ask. Different latent-language-ID methods give you different answers! We test 27 candidate languages across 12 diverse models, two of them analyzed through pretraining. Led by the amazing @bayazitdeniz.bsky.social 👇

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Hannes Mehrer @CCN2026 @hannesmehrer.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

"So, you have a highly predictive model, now what?" At this #CCN2026 event on Wed, 5 Aug, 4pm at NYU Skirball Theatre I will present work on using ANN brain models for visual prostheses (tinyurl.com/modelguidedm...) and for dyslexia (tinyurl.com/neuroaidysle..., first author: Melika Honarmand).

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Excited to be at #CCN2026 in NYC! I'll be presenting our spotlight poster, Topo-Omni, with @hannesmehrer.bsky.social 🧠 📍 Poster F14 — Session F 🗓️ Thursday, Aug 6 Come by if you're around, we'd love to talk about how our multimodal model can discover functionally selective brain regions!

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Finally wrote up something I've been thinking about for a while, and with CCN next week, feels like the moment to share it: is the "virtuous circle" between AI and neuroscience that Hassabis et al. described in 2017 still turning? Curious what you think! bkhmsi.substack.com/p/ai-and-neu...

bkhmsi.substack.com

AI and Neuroscience: Still a Virtuous Circle?

Neuroscience once handed AI its best ideas. Today the current runs mostly the other way.

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Atari from raw pixels. AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol. AlphaFold. DeepMind has inspired me for years, and its neuroscience work is why I got into NeuroAI. So it means a lot to say I've joined Google DeepMind in Zurich as a Student Researcher for the next few months. In Zurich? Say hi :)

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Yingtian (David) Tang @davidtyt.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

🚨 NEW PREPRINT Videos strongly shape activity across the visual cortex. But can we design videos that maximally drive specific brain regions? We present NEvo 🧬🧠 — a neural-guided evolutionary framework that synthesizes videos to maximally activate target visual ROIs. (1/10)

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Abdulkadir Gokce @akgokce.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

🧠 What's the best way to spend compute & neural data to build brain-aligned models? Our new ICML 2026 paper charts the scaling laws across 8 neural datasets & 600+ vision models. 👇 🌐 multimodal-brain-scaling.epfl.ch w/ @davidtyt.bsky.social & @mschrimpf.bsky.social

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Yingtian (David) Tang @davidtyt.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

🧠🎬 RELEASE We are releasing two Hugging Face model cards for video brain encoding. 🎥 short video clips → 🧠 brain responses MODEL 1: vjepa2-basic 🔗 huggingface.co/epfl-neuroai... MODEL 2: vjepa2-enhanced 🔗 huggingface.co/epfl-neuroai... Brain encoders. Off the shelf !

huggingface.co

epfl-neuroai/vjepa2-encoder-basic · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

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Martin Schrimpf @mschrimpf.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

A wiring-cost-like loss has been shown to induce brain-like topography in vision (eg www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... and language (e.g. topolm.epfl.ch, toponets.github.io). The same spatial loss yields cognitive clusters in a multimodal model which even discovers new ones! topo-omni.epfl.ch #NeuroAI🤖🧠🧪

cell.com

A unifying framework for functional organization in early and higher ventral visual cortex

Margalit et al. develop a topographic artificial neural network that predicts both functional responses and spatial organization of multiple cortical areas of the primate visual system. In turn, the m...

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

🚨 New Preprint! 🧠 We gave an AI model one simple rule: rearrange your neurons so that nearby ones respond alike. We never told it what a face, a voice, or a sentence was. It grew brain-like maps for all three anyway. 🧵👇 🌐 Website: topo-omni.epfl.ch

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

So why build toward a brain-encoding foundation model? → Simulate fMRI responses to sensory stimuli → Insights about the brain → Path toward clinical applications MIRAGE is our first step. 🧠 More on the project site: mirage-brain.epfl.ch w/ @akgokce.bsky.social & @mschrimpf.bsky.social

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Martin Schrimpf @mschrimpf.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Two simple ideas for building improved brain encoding models: 1. learn to use representations from all model layers via a gating mechanism + 2. start from natively multimodal features for multimodal predictions. State of the art performance; see mirage-brain.epfl.ch for details #NeuroAI 🧠🤖🧪

mirage-brain.epfl.ch

MIRAGE: Adaptive Multimodal Gating for Whole-Brain fMRI Encoding

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

🧠 When you watch a movie, your brain blends sight, sound, and speech into a single experience. Should models of the brain blend them too, or keep the senses separate until the very end? We built MIRAGE to find out. It sets a new SOTA for predicting whole-brain fMRI from movies. 🧵

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Crossed 1,000 citations on Google Scholar today, with an h-index of 15 🎈 What felt like a distant goal a few years ago is now real, and I'm especially proud that the bulk of it is carried by my first-author papers. On to the next milestone!

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Good morning #ICLR2026 ☀️ The Re-Align workshop kicks off in under an hour! A full day on what we can actually do with representational alignment, from brains to language models to agents. Schedule in the thread 👇

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Excited to be in Rio for #ICLR2026 🇧🇷 I'll be presenting our work, Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners (aka MiCRo), on Friday at Pavilion 3, 10:30 AM (#1610). Come say hi :D Happy to chat about NeuroAI, representational & cultural alignment, and/or test-time learning 🧠

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Peter Henderson @peterhenderson.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

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.

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

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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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

🚀 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... 🧵👇

huggingface.co

Re-Align Hackathon Leaderboard - a Hugging Face Space by representational-alignment

Submit Blue/Red hackathon JSON and rank by alignment scores.

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

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 🇧🇷 🏝️

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

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 🧵👇

egyptians-in-cs.github.io

Egyptian Researchers in Computer Science

A website dedicated to showcasing the profiles of prominent Egyptian researchers in Computer Science.

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Dota Tianai Dong @dotadotadota.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

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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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

🎉 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/

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

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. ✨

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Negar Foroutan @negarforoutan.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

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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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

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! :)

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

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

bkhmsi.github.io

Badr AlKhamissi's Website

I am a PhD candidate at EPFL, co-advised by Antoine Bosselut and Martin Schrimpf. My research lies at the intersection of machine learning, neuroscience and cognitive science. Prior to EPFL, I was an ...

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

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...

bkhmsi.github.io

Egyptians in AI Research

A website dedicated to showcasing the profiles of prominent Egyptian researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

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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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

🚀 Excited to share a major update to our “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners” (MiCRo) paper! We ask: What benefits can we unlock by designing language models whose inner structure mirrors the brain’s functional specialization? More below 🧠👇 cognitive-reasoners.epfl.ch

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Excited to be part of this cool work led by Melika Honarmand! We show that by selectively targeting VLM units that mirror the brain’s visual word form area, models develop dyslexic-like reading impairments, while leaving other abilities intact!! 🧠🤖 Details in the 🧵👇

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Now that the ICLR deadline is behind us, happy to share that From Language to Cognition has been accepted as an Oral at #EMNLP2025! 🎉 Looking forward to seeing many of you in Suzhou 🇨🇳

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Deniz Bayazit @bayazitdeniz.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

1/🚨 New preprint How do #LLMs’ inner features change as they train? Using #crosscoders + a new causal metric, we map when features appear, strengthen, or fade across checkpoints—opening a new lens on training dynamics beyond loss curves & benchmarks. #interpretability

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silingao.bsky.social @silingao.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

NEW PAPER ALERT: Recent studies have shown that LLMs often lack robustness to distribution shifts in their reasoning. Our paper proposes a new method, AbstRaL, to augment LLMs’ reasoning robustness, by promoting their abstract thinking with granular reinforcement learning.

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Antoine Bosselut @abosselut.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Check out @bkhmsi.bsky.social 's great work on mixture-of-expert models that are specialized to represent the behavior of known brain networks.

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

🚨 New Preprint!! Thrilled to share with you our latest work: “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners”, a modular transformer architecture inspired by the brain’s functional networks: language, logic, social reasoning, and world knowledge. 1/ 🧵👇

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Excited to present tomorrow at the @c3nlp.bsky.social workshop at #NAACL2025 our position paper: "Hire Your Anthropologist!" 🎓 Led by the amazing Mai Alkhamissi & @lrz-persona.bsky.social, under the supervision of @monadiab77.bsky.social. Don’t miss it! 😄 arXiv link coming soon!

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

Excited to be at #NAACL2025 in Albuquerque! I’ll be presenting our paper “The LLM Language Network” as an Oral tomorrow at 2:00 PM in Ballroom C, hope to see you there! Looking forward to all the discussions! 🎤 🧠

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Hannes Mehrer @CCN2026 @hannesmehrer.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Before ICLR 2025 comes to an end today, a few #NeuroAI impressions from Singapore. First, very happy to present our work on TopoLM as an oral, here with @neilrathi.bsky.social initial thread: bsky.app/profile/hann... paper: doi.org/10.48550/arX... code: github.com/epflneuroailab

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Not at #ICLR2025 this year, but excited that @neilrathi.bsky.social and @hannesmehrer.bsky.social will be presenting our TopoLM paper during Friday’s Oral Session 4C. Don’t miss it!

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

With the Studio Ghibli AI trend taking over the internet, it's a good moment to reshare a blog post I wrote two years ago: The Curse of "Creative" AI. Interested to hear your thoughts on this matter! medium.com/@bkhmsi/the-...

medium.com

The Curse of ‘Creative’ AI

Should we create art using AI?

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

🚨 New Preprint!! LLMs trained on next-word prediction (NWP) show high alignment with brain recordings. But what drives this alignment—linguistic structure or world knowledge? And how does this alignment evolve during training? Our new paper explores these questions. 👇🧵

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Antoine Bosselut @abosselut.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Lots of great news out of the EPFL NLP lab these last few weeks. We'll be at @iclr-conf.bsky.social and @naaclmeeting.bsky.social in April / May to present some of our work in training dynamics, model representations, reasoning, and AI democratization. Come chat with us during the conference!

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

It’s very inspiring how scientists throughout history turned technological limitations into innovation. Constraints spark creativity! ✨ Must watch video: youtu.be/YdOXS_9_P4U?...

youtu.be

Terence Tao on how we measure the cosmos | Distance ladder part 1

YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Excited to share that our paper, 'The LLM Language Network,' has been accepted to NAACL 2025! Looking forward to presenting it in Albuquerque—see you there! 🏜️ #NAACL2025

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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

🚀 Exciting milestone: Egyptians in AI Research now features 170 amazing minds shaping the future of technology! 🌍💡 Know someone not listed? Submit their info and let's grow this inspiring community! 🤝 Explore here: bkhmsi.github.io/egyptians-in...

bkhmsi.github.io

Egyptians in AI Research

A website dedicated to showcasing the profiles of prominent Egyptian researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

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