Wilka Carvalho
@cogscikid
@KempnerInst research fellow @Harvard interested in scaling up (deep) reinforcement learning theories of human cognition. prev: deepmind, umich, msr
Excited to share a new project spanning cognitive science and AI where we develop a novel deep reinforcement learning model---Multitask Preplay---that explains how people generalize to new tasks that were previously accessible but unpursued.
We’re thrilled to introduce the 2025 cohort of #KempnerInstitute Graduate Fellows! This year’s recipients include grad students enrolled across five @Harvard Ph.D. programs. Read more: bit.ly/3TYzZ5H @hseas, @HarvardGSAS, @harvardphysics @PiN_Harvard #AI #NeuroAI #ML
(cont.) "So claude sucks. It can’t solve any hard problem. But… people really underestimate the amount of open source maintenance that is not hard problems." discourse.julialang.org/t/the-use-of-c…
a paradox I'm currently grappling with: choosing actions valued by your "group" increases your morale, but being able to choose actions that go against the norms of your group increases your agency 🤔
We received the Best Paper award of #aied for Askademia! Askademia is a video question-answering platform for live and asynchronous educational videos hosted on any platform! If you want to try Askademia, please reach out through our contact page. Link: askademia.org
Great news! #AIED2025 best paper award goes to the team of @NargesNorouzi - a co-PI of our NSF-AoF project! We are all proud!
#BINBoston is back! 🧠🎉 Join us Sat, Aug 2 from 2–5 PM for a community social with local scholars & professionals. All are welcome — students, faculty, & more! 📍Register for details: tinyurl.com/BINBoston2025 #BlackInNeuro #NeuroTwitter #Networking
Great to see my writing from over 2 years ago still resonates enough to inspire a new team at GDM, and is even used verbatim in the job listing. 🥲
You know how RL is that whole big thing nowadays? Present your work at the first-ever New York Reinforcement Learning Workshop (NYRL), co-organized by Amazon, Columbia Business School & NYU Tandon School of Engineering. ny-rl.com!
Two squad goals achieved for @thought_channel! Being featured in @Forbes, AND having our main conference series called "The Burning Man of Brain Science" 😎 🔥 Hats off to the team! And, thanks ever so much for the excellent article @JosipaMajic. Link to article below 👇
🚨New workshop alert 🚨 Calling all RL researchers in the New York area 🧠🗽 Present your work at the first-ever New York Reinforcement Learning Workshop (NYRL), co-organized by Amazon, Columbia Business School & NYU Tandon School of Engineering. ny-rl.com
Humble brag…They won’t believe a little girl from Kenya built the orchestration engine for this, but I did!
Google right now has ~1 million (H100 equivalent) Ironwood v7 TPUs and 500K H100 GPUs online. With 400-600K NVIDIA Blackwell (GB200 NVL72 racks) GPUs incoming. So total compute capacity = 2 million H100 equivalents by end of year. They will spend $85 billion in 2025 (raised…
I have a rule of (mostly) only collaborating/working with friends way more rewarding
"Prioritization". I prioritized what to do based on a simple metric "(impact remaining)/(# top talent working)". Each research, model, product, or business has finite impact, and as more progresses are made and more talented people notice its impact and get in, this metric…
I’m building a new team at @GoogleDeepMind to work on Open-Ended Discovery! We’re looking for strong Research Scientists and Research Engineers to help us push the frontier of autonomously discovering novel artifacts such as new knowledge, capabilities, or algorithms, in an…
Our team @GoogleDeepMind is hiring! You'll join an incredible team passionate about building AGI in the physical world. We're one of the only labs innovating at the cutting edge of both frontier LLMs & humanoids, and we have a ton of fun doing it Apply: job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind
We're launching an "AI psychiatry" team as part of interpretability efforts at Anthropic! We'll be researching phenomena like model personas, motivations, and situational awareness, and how they lead to spooky/unhinged behaviors. We're hiring - join us! job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs…
Why do video models handle motion so poorly? It might be lack of motion equivariance. Very excited to introduce: Flow Equivariant RNNs (FERNNs), the first sequence models to respect symmetries over time. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.14793 Blog: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/research/deepe… 1/🧵
Save the dates! Next year's conferences will be: Human-Centered Teaching in Boston, November 14-16, 2025 Teaching Generation AI-Z in San Francisco, February 13-15, 2026 Teaching Executive Skills in New York City, April 16-18, 2026
New in the #DeeperLearningBlog: #KempnerInstitute research fellow @t_andy_keller introduces the first flow equivariant neural networks, which reflect motion symmetries, greatly enhancing generalization and sequence modeling. bit.ly/451fQ48 #AI #NeuroAI
Here are today's #ICML2025 presentations from the #KempnerInstitute!