Colin Conwell (Coco)

Researcher in Cognitive (Neuro)Science & Machine Learning (AI),
Multimodal (Vision-Language) Modeling of Brains & Behavior
Curious about all things computational, aesthetic, animal and machine.

Disclaimer: This site is (kinda) under construction! Please forgive any issues with rendering.

Biography

Friends call me Coco, and you can, too! I’m a hybrid academic and industry research scientist, working broadly in the areas of computational cognitive (neuro)science and machine learning (AI), but with a particular focus on the intersection of perception and language in the understanding (and reverse engineering) of human intelligence. As a graduate student in the Harvard Vision Sciences Lab, I worked mainly on understanding the role of rapid, subsymbolic perceptual computations in higher-order cognitive processes through the lens of emergent AI technologies. As an undergraduate, I studied comparative literature and international relations, with emphases on language learning, security, indigenous knowledge, and sustainable development.

The overarching question in my research these days is the question of how the mind makes meaning of the chaos that bombards our senses, and how we then communicate that meaning to other minds. I believe deeply that our ability to use language in service of communication is the cornerstone of our intelligence and our greatest hope for further human flourishing.

Outside of work (and sometimes at work), I live for the experience of beauty, embodied most particularly for me in two people speaking, with or without words; cookies and cream; well-designed computer programs, the moonlight reflecting off a lake onto the eyes of old friends sitting side-by-side on the dock; West African blues, Anatolian folk, Bedouin dark techno, (any music with a Saz, Khora, or thumping bass at 140BPM); calavera masks, stark desert still lifes, sleeping cats, evolutionary spandrels, novo adagio, good neighbors with no fences, the wonderful, terrifying, seemingly limitless potential of the human spirit, and buffalo sauce.

A copy of my (potentially outdated) curriculum vitae may be found at this link.

Tutorials

Here, you’ll find a collection of Google Colaboratory tutorials covering a range of topics, all with interactive Python code.

Archives

Below is a random collection of curio from my life in science and art. I call them “archives”, but a better name might be something like “snapshots of a scatter-brain in science” or “mind fossils”. They’re basically a patchwork parchment of things I once thought, projects I began but never (really) finished, or ideas that never quite came to fruition. I decided to keep them here one day on a whim when (on the verge of deleting them in service of “an updated website”), I figured instead that fossils are informative not because they tell us how things should be, but because they tell us how things were. Science is process, our minds evolve like bodies do, and ideas without history are like people without stories – (at best) very forgetful, (at minimum) very forgettable, and (at worst) forgotten altogether.

Here then for your viewing pleasure are some of my fossils:

Project Pages

Back in the day, I always loved reading publications from Distill, and once somehow thought I’d have the time to ‘distill’ all of my own projects in similar style… This didn’t quite go as planned for most of my projects, but here’s the ones that made it:

… almost certainly more fossils to come as we continue to evolve further!

My People

Beyond anything else that makes me who I am, it is the people (family, friends, collaborators, mentors, mentees) that have taught me over the years.

Below is a list I’ve tried to make of at least some of those people I’ve been lucky enough to know and that I think you should know about, too! (I also try to keep a more exhaustive list here, but it’s not always as updated as I would like it to be.)

And of course, my partner in science, art, and life alike, Chelsea Boccagno.

Contact Info

Email: conwell[at]g[dot]harvard[dot]edu or colinconwell[at]gmail[dot]com