Ajani Stewart

Excited to share our new research—led by @harinlee.info —using rare @researchdeezer.bsky.social data to uncover how music choices reflect both individual preferences and city-level cultural patterns. A unique collaboration between science and industry! 🎶📊 #BigData @co3lab.bsky.social

At Frontiers in NeuroAI symposium @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social, I will be presenting a poster entitled "A Model of Continuous Phoneme Recognition Reveals the Role of Context in Human Speech Perception" (Poster #17).

Work done with @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social.

#NeuroAI2025

🧵1/4

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

In case you missed CDS last week, here is the preprint for Young-Eun Lee's presentation:,
"Children learn what is right or wrong selectively from a legitimate authority’s punishment"
osf.io/preprints/os...

Cents and shenshibility: The role of reward in talker-specific phonetic recalibration - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics To what degree might speech perception be affected by factors external to the speech signal? Here, we consider whether listeners consider the value of individual talkers (e.g., a person that is import...

New science alert!!! Myself, Shawn Cummings, Sahil Luthra, & @emilymyers.bsky.social tested whether monetary reward during talker-specific phonetic recalibration biased listeners to learn more about one talker vs another. The results are complicated? doi.org/10.3758/s13414-025-03048-z (1/thread)

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability

Amodei: "For several years, we [...] have been trying to solve this problem, to create the analogue of a highly precise and accurate MRI that would fully reveal the inner workings of an AI model."

Neuroimaging folks: "How do we break this to you..."

www.darioamodei.com/post/the-urg...

Does your research involve comparing experimental conditions? Then our latest publication is for you: We developed generalized contrastive PCA (gcPCA), a tool for comparing high-dimensional datasets. 🧠📊 doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012747
This tool was born out of necessity, here is the story. 🧵
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PREreview: Open preprint reviews. For all researchers.

100%. I admit only having one up at prereview.org but plan to do a whole lot more. Also I'd imagine the role of editors will become even more important in terms of discovery as soon as we move to the preprints-as-primary model. So we need platforms for editorializing as well as preprint peer review.

Recalled Brunch & Go Stroller Toy and tag with model number

#RECALL: About 250K Fisher-Price Brunch & Go Stroller Toys recalled. The yolk of the toy egg can crack and create small parts, posing a choking hazard to young children.
Get replacement toy. CONTACT: 855-853-6224 or at www.service.mattel.com.

More: cpsc.gov/Recalls/2025...

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

Doctor Behind Award-Winning Parkinson’s Research Among Scientists Purged From NIH Leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the US’s leading medical research agency, were swept up Tuesday in the Trump administration’s latest firing blitz.

At least 10 principal researchers at NIH have been fired, including Richard Youle, winner of the Breakthrough Prize for his groundbreaking research identifying mechanisms behind Parkinson’s disease.
Is this making America great?

www.wired.com/story/doctor...

International scientists rethink U.S. conference attendance Opposition to Trump administration and fears of customs run-ins are shifting travel plans

Featuring @maximoprado.bsky.social ! International scientists rethink U.S. conference attendance | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Not sure if this has been shared here yet, but this is video of Rumeysa Ozturk's arrest posted by WCVB. It's terrifying.

Mother and daughter smiling while holding a book titled "Sam is my Sister"

🚨 ALL my remaining NIH grants were just terminated

Without philanthropic gifts, this is the end of
1️⃣ my career (as I know it)
2️⃣ @lgbtqhealthexce.bsky.social
3️⃣ our LGBTQ health equity work

Yet, reading about LGBTQ families in my kid's class reminded me: love knows no bounds 🌈

You with us?

Here are six examples of how foreign visitors to the US with no criminal record are being treated:

1. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holding student with no criminal record married to an American is abducted by ICE and is still in detention over a week later.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/n...
......

I decided to start a #thread 🧵 of stories about legal residents and tourists being (illegally) arrested, detained and/or deported by the Trump regime. I'll only post stories from serious sources, as rumors and conspiracies are really not needed in this authoritarian moment.

We don't spend a penny on marketing. It's all word of mouth for @costplusdrugs.com

That's how we keep prices so low. Please spread the word !

We need to organize--let’s help each other.

NIH is cancelling grants, but it's not clear exactly what they're cancelling and why. Without this information, we can't respond.

I've started a Google Sheet to track grant cancellations.

Please add any canceled grants you know of and spread the word!

Trump Decried Millions Spent 'Making Mice Transgender.' It Was Cancer and Asthma Research President Trump falsely claimed that Biden spent $8 million on 'making mice transgender,' but the real research was for human health.

Trump claimed the Biden administration spent $8 million "making mice transgender." The White House tried to back up this number with records of funding for research into cancer, asthma, and HIV, some of which used *transgenic* (genetically modified) mice.

This is Marco Rubio explaining how the USA promised to defend Ukraine forever if they got rid of their nuclear arsenal left after the Soviet Union fell.

This is why lil marco was sinking into the couch. He was hoping we wouldn’t find it…so don’t RT right now this very second.

The berlephent is so precious

The peoples union tour of black out dates for businesses starting with February 28th - economic blackout

I love a good tour

If you are here at the last day of ARO, don’t miss Sagarika Alavilli’s talk on “Measuring and Modeling Multi-Source Environmental Sound Recognition”, happening at 9:45 in Ocean Ballroom 9 - 12.

Two posters from our lab on deep auditory models, presented today at ARO:

T107 - “Modeling Normal and Impaired Hearing With Deep Neural Networks Optimized for Ecological Tasks” by Mark Saddler et al.

T138 - “Modeling Continuous Speech Perception Using Artificial Neural Networks” by Gasser Elbanna

Two more posters from our lab are being presented today at ARO:

M133 - “Neural Network Models of Hearing Clarify Factors Limiting Cochlear Implant Outcomes” by Annesya Banerjee et al.

M166 - “Preferences for Loudness and Pitch Vary Across Cultures” by Malinda McPherson et al.

If you are at ARO today, lots of stuff to see from our lab.

Posters:
SU181 - “Optimization Under Ecological Realism Reproduces Signatures of Human Speech Recognition” by Annika Magaro et al.

SU184 - “Texture Streaming in Auditory Scenes” by Jarrod Hicks

If at ARO today, check out Lakshmi Govindarajan's poster on "Confidence in Sound Localization Reflects Calibrated Uncertainty Estimation". Number S147 if you are at the meeting.