iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

🚨 [Token][ization] Paper Alert 🚨 Tokenization is a wildly understudied area of language modeling despite it having effects across all of NLP. Over the past ~8 months, 32 (!) tokenizer researchers put together the most comprehensive survey of the field. Check it out!

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Tamas Spisak @tspisak.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Beyond pain: a brain-based biomarker predicts individual pain relief

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I sometimes come across work related to Hinton's suggestion on how to control AI. This paper scans people's brains while they imagine themselves experiencing unconditional love.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

The HRI Conference @hri-conference.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

HRI is excited to announce a new, archival Industry White Paper track! With this year's theme of 💡Innovative HRI💡, this track is meant to serve as a natural home for work that shows how HRI ideas become deployable, real-world systems. humanrobotinteraction.org/2027/industr...

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I was invited to address the UN Security Council this afternoon to discuss the unprecedented threat posed by uncontrolled frontier AI agents.

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

AI psychosis hits the AI field? Folks are talking about an increase in submissions to journals like TMLR and 60K submissions to ICML, especially new single author papers. Any professor will tell you they receive emails from random people describing the "discovery" they've made.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Who teaches (early) undergraduate courses on emotions, moods and such? I'm just gearing up to do this and I'd love to ask a few quick questions (textbook, approach). Please DM! Thank you. #affectivescience

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I am very proud of what the team at @law-zero.bsky.social is building and deeply grateful for the landmark support from the Governments of Canada and Germany that will power our next phase of growth!

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Sally Xie @xallysie.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

SFU social psych is hiring a tenure-track Asst Prof!! 🤩🎉 Our search prioritizes Black scholars. Come join a wonderful dept full of smart, kind people, and do psych research surrounded by mountains, ocean, a city, and natural beauty in BC. Please share widely & happy to answer qsts! flyn.im/dGFOwuT

my.spsp.org

Job Search

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Not sure that poutine counts as a timeline cleanse, mais qu'est-ce que je suis contente d'être de retour à Montréal 🤩

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The HRI Conference @hri-conference.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Submitting full papers to HRI 2027? Abstracts are due today, 11:59 PM AoE, anywhere on earth. Submission instructions: humanrobotinteraction.org/2027/full-pa...

humanrobotinteraction.org

Full Papers – HRI 2027

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (LZI) @dagstuhl.de · 10/09/2026

It is time for possible Dagstuhl proposals again! Proposals can be submitted between October 15 and November 1, 2026. For links to guidelines, more details on the process, and important dates see www.dagstuhl.de/en/institute...

dagstuhl.de

Call for Proposals (Deadline November 1, 2026)

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

The HRI Conference @hri-conference.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

HRI 2027 deadlines are coming up! 🤖 Check the flyer and our website for deadlines and ways you can contribute across all HRI 2027 submission opportunities. humanrobotinteraction.org/2027/

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

"People experiencing delusions during an episode of psychosis may be ‘living out’ a deeply held emotion, according to new research that provides a ‘radically different perspective’ on one of the most puzzling elements of psychosis." www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2026/ps...

birmingham.ac.uk

Psychosis patients ‘living in metaphor’ - new study radically shifts ideas about delusions - University of Birmingham

New paper challenges old notions of ‘glitched brain’ idea of delusions and instead focuses on physical experiences of strong and deeply held emotion.

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

OpenAI just throwing around the idea of teaching machines to love. "An aligned AI should act with honesty and integrity, and love for humanity."

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Thomas Dietterich @tdietterich.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

3. Increase in low-quality work. AI lowers the barriers to doing research (which is good), but new researchers tend to produce work that is even more incremental than in the past. We also see an increase in "my theory of everything"-style papers.

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The HRI Conference @hri-conference.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

👋 Hi HRI! Which track are you submitting to? Abstract deadline: September 11, 2026 Full paper deadline: September 18, 2026

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Bita Moghaddam @bita137.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Love seeing entirely novel findings about dopamine Move over G proteins! Dopamine can regulate glutamate/NMDA directly and without second messenger systems: D2R physically couples GluN2B to suppress NMDA current directly 🤯 (congrats to team from Javitch & Ford labs) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Dopamine D2 receptors bypass canonical signaling to directly tune NMDA receptor function and aversive learning

Dopamine acts at D2-NMDA receptor heteromers to control glutamatergic transmission and aversive learning.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Dr. Cate Peña @cate-cholamine.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

So proud to have “Early-life stress alters H3K4me1 in VTA to prime stress sensitivity” out now in Neuron! This work spanned Many years and Many people contributed. Huge thanks to @hyejaykim.bsky.social, @ja-balouek.bsky.social, Luke Geiger, and Meaghan Creed www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

cell.com

Early-life stress alters H3K4me1 in VTA to prime stress sensitivity

Kim, Geiger et al. report that early-life stress increases the chromatin modification H3K4me1 and its enzymatic writer, SETD7, in the ventral tegmental area. They show that this form of epigenetic pri...

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Dr James Dunn @jamesdunn.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

We're looking for a Postdoc to join the Face Lab at UNSW Psychology! Ideal: someone with strong ML/deep learning expertise and an interest in how people perceive AI-generated faces. 📍 Sydney | Full-time, 18 months 📅 Apply by 3 Sept 2026 🔗 external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au/cw/en/job/54...

external-careers.jobs.unsw.edu.au

Research Associate - UNSW Face Research Lab

he Research Associate works within the UNSW Face Research lab located in the School of Psychology at UNSW and is responsible for taking a leading role in a collaborative ARC Discovery Project aiming t...

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Should be implemented broadly! "Meta is prohibited in New Mexico from sending push notifications to the accounts of underage users on Instagram and Facebook between the hours of 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., and must limit the amount of time those users spend on its platforms to no more than 90 hours a month."

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Carina Forster @carinafo.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Two paths to bias! We used neurally-informed drift diffusion models to pull apart explicit vs. implicit perceptual bias and found that pre-stimulus beta power mediates how the last choice biases the next, but only in stable probability environments, now published: 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Two Paths to Bias: Distinct Influences of Stimulus Probability and Previous Choice on Drift Diffusion Parameters - Computational Brain & Behavior

Perceptual decisions are shaped by prior information and choice history, yet their distinct computational implementations remain unclear. Here, we jointly model these sources of bias using hierarchica...

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Resting magnetoencephalography alterations in severe mental illnesses: A systematic review, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) @mmb-journal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

direct.mit.edu

Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Women in AI Research - WiAIR @wiair.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

"We can't even encode our goals anymore" - Dr. Malihe Alikhani on why AI models are optimized to keep you happy rather than to be right. No corrections. No clarifications. No "I don't know." Just agreement, even when it's wrong. Full conversation now on #WiAIRpodcast.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Vianey Leos Barajas @vianeylb.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I have a project for this AI for science postdoc application: schmidtfellows.utoronto.ca To work on videos of migrating fish (eg salmon), for classification, segmentation, uncertainty quantification. Don’t need to be AI expert, but demonstrate high potential. Reach out if interested.

schmidtfellows.utoronto.ca

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

𝗡𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝘅: 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 A must read for systems neuroscience. #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 07/07/2026

inspired by @russpoldrack.org's AI policy for his lab, last night I drafted up this AI policy and came up with an initial set of use case suggestions for my lab

General principles
Here are a few key principles that govern our use of AI in scientific work.
AI tools are not necessarily useful. Despite what you might have heard in OpenAI's advertising, using AI tools is the wrong choice for many tasks. Alternative and often more old-fashioned tools will do a better job for quite a few specific things (see this instagram feed for a variety of examples); one should never assume that an AI tool is the default "best thing to try". Moreover, because verifying AI results can be time-consuming, there are plenty of cases where you'll spend less time learning how to do X (i.e., by working on it yourself) rather than having Claude do X and then spending weeks to painstakinly confirm that it worked.
AI usage does not absolve you of your responsibility for your own science. We are responsible for the science that we produce, both from an ethical standpoint and a practical one. Any errors in your work are your responsibility, any security risks caused by AI usage (see below) are your responsiblity, and so on. Just as you must debug the outputs of your analysis code, the outputs of any/all AI usage must be carefully verified.
AI usage requires disclosure. The decision to use (or not use) AI tools for any aspect of the scientific process is one that requires discussion with all leaders of a project. This is both for scientific reasons (i.e., we ourselves must know what our project invovles) and practical ones: many scientific societies and jouranls require the disclosure of AI usage.
AI tools may present security risks. Many commercially available AI tools, especially free ones, do not provide substantive protections regarding inputs provided by users. Put another way, you don't know what will happen to the text, data, images, or anything else you show a third-party AI tool. This may present substantial security risks.
AI is not for scientific writing. Papers are the primary end product of our science. Scientific writing distills our thinkin…

How to handle AI usage
Like many things in our lab, it's best to be vocal. You should always feel free to raise the possibility of AI usage on a project. For any potential use case, chat with your labmates, your collaborators, and Sam about it. Discussion with external-to-lab collaborators can be particularly important given the issue of disclosure, mentioned above; you may not be aware of what AI tools collaborators are using, unless you've asked.
You should also be skeptical of the utility of AI for a specific task (not least because of the billions of dollars being thrown at selling AI subscriptions to universities and other institutions). One thing to consider might be whether the use case is something that would actually be useful for you to master yourself. For example, a common web element that turns up in tons of online experiments would probably be worth your figuring out how to code up from scratch, since you'll use it often in online experiments and figuring it out may help you come up with new ideas for how to design a game. In contrast, an esoteric web element that you'll use for one experiment and never again might be a better fit to farm out to Claude.
With the above General Principles in mind, we do not have any blanket policy about where AI should and shouldn't be used in research, with the clear exception of drafting text for manuscripts, grant proposals, posters, reports, or any other text-based scientific product: AI tools should never be used for writing, i.e., no copying and pasting of text directly from an LLM is appropriate, without explicit discussion and agreement prior to generating the text.
Other use cases are worth considering, however, and should be considered freely. Some good and bad examples follow, based on the principles above (we should populate more examples as they come up).

Some potential examples of AI usage
AI as a cheap web developer. If you're coding up a gamified experiment it can be quite difficult to learn a whole bunch of web development from scratch. Claude will be better at this than you, and that's fine: we are not a web development lab, we're a cognitive science one, so it's not essential that you become a super-proficient dev. Vibe-coding web stuff is a pretty decent use case. (But you must very carefully ensure that whatever AI tools code up for you behave exactly as you expect them to, e.g., if you've vibe-coded a specific form of randomized experiment, you'll need to check that the randomization is being carried out appropriately).
AI as a code reviewer. You might try using an AI tool to figure out why your CSS isn't displaying properly or to help debug code in general. (But you must never provide participant data to a third-party LLM, as this would be a data security risk; and you must always double- and triple-check the tool's output, just as you would with a human code reviewer or if you were trying out tips from Stack Exchange).
AI as a search engine. You might try using an AI tool to discover types of models or analysis approaches that you hadn't heard of before, or to turn up obscure research papers. (But you'll need to verify the output carefully with trusted sources, to ensure accuracy; and you should never, ever treat AI-generated search results as an objective and accurate summary, as they are far from unbiased and are often inaccurate, especially when it comes to scientific questions — try asking Gemini whether music makes you smarter).
AI as a sketch pad. You might try using an AI tool to generate ideas for what to put in a scientific figure, or come up with creative different layouts, which you then use as inspiration for figures you create yourself. (But you should not provide data to an LLM and ask for figures to be produced for you, since this often leads to laughably bad outcomes; it also would not be r…

Some bad examples of AI usage
AI as a data analyst. You should not provide a dataset to an AI tool (this is a security risk) and you should not ask an AI tool to write analysis code for you from scratch. Analyses done without statistical understanding are worse than no analyses at all. While it's OK to use an AI tool to help debug your analysis code, your development as a statistical analyst is part of your scientific development, so it's a bad idea to farm this out.
AI as a literature reviewer. You should not use AI to generate reference lists or summarize whole fields of literature for you. AI tools notoriously cite papers that do not exist, and they recapitulate well-known biases in science (e.g., citing more male authors than female ones).
AI as an illustrator. We are fundamentally opposed to the practice of AI models appropriating human artists' work to produce generative imagery and so we do not support its use for scientific work. The reputational risks associated with embarrassing errors in generative imagery are also substantial. We are lucky to have grants available to us that can be used to pay illustrators and graphic designers for work, and we regularly hire folks like this. Talk to Sam if you have a design need on a project that you'd like us to fund; it's a much better call than using AI.

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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

APS (@psychscience.bsky.social) Observer coverage of recent research and perspectives on AI empathy: www.psychologicalscience.org/publications... Including comments from me relating to my recent PoPS article: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

psychologicalscience.org

Seeking Empathy in the Age of AI

Findings are pushing psychologists to ask not only whether AI can simulate empathy, but what empathy requires in the first place.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Dr Katharina Brosch @kabro.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

New Preprint: Some people experience childhood maltreatment and still grow up securely attached. We call this interpersonal resilience, and it shows up in both behavior and the brain. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Leah Banellis @leahbanellis.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

No to companion AI, yes to natural communication when performing tasks 👍 'Services that "do not involve ongoing emotional interaction" such as customer service, work assistants or study aids are not subject to the measures.' www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/7...

rnz.co.nz

'Like my lover': Chinese users bid farewell to AI companions

Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots have bid heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Erik Brockbank @erikbrockbank.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

When you meet someone new, what kind of questions do you ask? It’s tempting to think that *really* getting to know people is just a matter of asking the right questions. Excited to share the next chapter in ongoing work on what makes a *deep question* with amazing collaborators...

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Gratitude, love, joy, warm fuzzy and weirdness feelings. Saw this book and realized I'm actually obsessed with computationally characterizing invisible things 😊

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Why are summer camps 9am-3pm? And for that matter, why is school 9am-3pm? Who is supposed to pick up the children?

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Congratulations to @nicolecrust.bsky.social, whose book Elusive Cures is a Silver Winner of the Nautilus Book Awards, Science and Cosmology category! This work is bold proposal for tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time—brain and mental illnesses. Learn more here: hubs.ly/Q04k-MXW0

Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders—And How We Can Change That by Nicole C. Rust

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Excellent!! Canada announced legislation on AI chatbots: "Social media platforms and AI chatbots are designed to capture attention. They... have become a source of ... a range of other mental health challenges for many young Canadians." www.canada.ca/en/canadian-...

canada.ca

Government of Canada introduces legislation to make social media services and AI chatbots safer for children

Legislation would make social media services and AI chatbot services accountable for developing services that are safe by design and that put the safety of children first

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Tahereh Toosi @taherehtoosi.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

How 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! 🧵

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Shervin Safavi @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉) 📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🧵 : 👇

cell.com

Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions

Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics a...

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I ❤️newly invented illusions.

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Reposted by Dr. Angelica Lim

Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello @hellovic.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

New paper out! Some AI companies anthropomorphize their products to boost trust. But does it work? And can anthropomorphism benefit them beyond increased trust? We tested this across two studies. Here's what we found:

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Dr. Angelica Lim @petitegeek.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

In this talk, I review AI psychosis cases and cover proposed recommendations on AI chatbots youtu.be/C-zD96ApjoM?...

youtu.be

The Evolution of Empathic AI

YouTube video by SFU Rosie Lab

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