Recent & Upcoming Talks

Our ability to perceive motion arises from a hierarchy of motion-tuned cells in visual cortices. Signatures of V1 and MT motion tuning …
May 17, 2022 5:15 PM — 7:15 PM St Pete Beach, Florida

Visually understanding the world requires us to interpret surface properties like shape, depth, and reflectance from retinal …
Mar 18, 2022 8:00 PM — 11:00 PM Lisbon, Portugal

Using visual perception as a case study, I will propose that questions in cognitive science are not passed from one discipline to the …
Dec 13, 2021 2:30 PM — 3:30 PM Noto, Sicily

Level Up Human is a podcast panel show, in which scientists compete to pitch improvements to the human design. In this episode, I pitch …
May 6, 2020 8:30 AM — 12:30 PM

News

Nov-01-22

Joining the faculty of the University of Auckland, late 2022

University of Auckland, New Zealand

I am thrilled to be joining the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland from 1st November 2022 as a Senior Lecturer. I will take up a Marsden Fast Start grant (project title ‘Learning to see the world: visual understanding through unsupervised learning’), lecture, and establish my own research group.
Apr-01-22

Facial similarity modelling paper accepted in PNAS

PNAS

A long-running collaboration with Kamila Jozwik and others from my time in Niko Kriegeskorte’s lab has been accepted at PNAS. Preprint available here
Nov-03-21

Awarded 3-year Marsden Fast Start Grant

Royal Society Te Apārangi, New Zealand

Awarded a three-year grant to establish an independent research programme ‘Learning to see the world: visual understanding through unsupervised learning’ from the Royal Society of New Zealand (grant announcements).
Jul-01-21

Multisensory modelling paper accepted in PNAS

PNAS

A collaboration with Reuben Rideaux, Guido Maiello and Andrew Welchman on how multisensory neurons solve causal inference, has been accepted at PNAS: read it here
May-07-21

Unsupervised gloss paper published in Nature Human Behaviour

Nature Human Behaviour

My first major project with Roland Fleming, a statistical learning account of material perception, has recently come out in Nature Human Behaviour: Unsupervised learning predicts human perception and misperception of gloss. PDF of press release available here (in German) and in English translation
Feb-26-21

Paper accepted at Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

A major project from my postdoc with Niko Kriegeskorte has been accepted at the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: Diverse deep neural networks all predict human IT well, after training and fitting.
Jan-05-20

Social Media Editor for Perception and i-Perception journals

SAGE Publishers

As of 2020, I’ve taken up a small role as Social Media Editor for the Perception and i-Perception journals. See what we’re up to at https://twitter.com/perceptionSAGE.
Dec-01-19

Awarded Humboldt Research Fellowship

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

In 2019 was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers, from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation: https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/home.html. I will use the 2-year fellowship to continue my work with Prof. Roland Fleming at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, on unsupervised deep learning of visual properties.
Sep-01-19

New paper published: Learning to See Stuff

Current Opinion in Behavioral Science

My first paper with Roland Fleming is out, in which we present a case for the importance of unsupervised learning in core visual perception: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2019.07.004.
Aug-12-19 – Aug-14-19

Symposium: How Humans and Machines Learn to See

Rauischholzhausen Castle, Hesse, Germany

Together with Prof Roland Fleming, I organised a 3-day symposium this August, bringing together machine learning researchers, computational visual neuroscientists, and developmental vision scientists to discuss ecologically plausible visual learning at the Rauischholzhausen Castle, Hesse, Germany. Funded by the German Research Council (DFG) under the SFB project ‘Cardinal Mechanisms of Perception’ https://www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/sfb/

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
November 2022 – Present
New Zealand

Senior Lecturer

University of Auckland

  • Psychophysics
  • Unsupervised deep learning
 
 
 
 
 
December 2019 – October 2022
Giessen, Germany

Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow

Justus-Liebig University

  • Psychophysics
  • Unsupervised deep learning
 
 
 
 
 
January 2018 – November 2019
Giessen, Germany

Postdoc

Justus-Liebig University

  • Psychophysics
  • Unsupervised deep learning
 
 
 
 
 
July 2017 – December 2017
London, UK

Data Scientist

Twitter

Optimising measurement of perceived video quality.
 
 
 
 
 
February 2015 – June 2017
Cambridge, UK

Postdoc

MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge

  • Representational similarity analysis
  • fMRI
  • Deep learning
 
 
 
 
 
July 2014 – October 2013
London, UK

Teaching Fellow in Visual Perception

University College London

Coordinating and lecturing undergraduate psychology courses.
 
 
 
 
 
November 2011 – February 2015
Brisbane, Australia

PhD candidate

University of Queensland

Thesis: “Norms are Not the Norm: Testing Theories of Sensory Encoding using Visual Aftereffects”

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