About

I am an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the departments of Computing Science and Psychology at the University of Alberta. I am a fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and I hold a CIFAR Canadian AI Chair (2018-2023). Prior to this, I was faculty at the University of Victoria.

My interests are Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning and Neuroscience. My work combines all three of these areas to study the way the human brain processes language.

Computer models of language are typically built using large bodies of text (corpora) collected from the Internet. These models have become very large and very accurate, but they still fall short in a few ways. First, they need a huge amount of data to train. Secondly, they misjudge meaning when inference or common sense is required. My research takes inspiration from what we know about the brain to improve language models, making them more efficient and more effective.

I also study language in the brain more directly using brain imaging technologies like EEG and fMRI. We record brain activity while people read and compare that to the inner workings of computer language models. This helps us to explore how the brain processes language, but also gives us additional insight into how we might improve these language models.

Here's my CV.

Interested in working with me? Here is what to include when contacting me.

Background

Before joining the University of Alberta, I received a BSc and MSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, and worked at Google as a Software Engineer. I completed my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was advised by Dr. Tom Mitchell. My PhD Thesis is available here.

My name is sometimes a source of confusion. My first name (Alona) rhymes with sauna and iguana. My last name (Fyshe) looks complicated, but is just pronounced fish. Here's a graphic to help:

Talks

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting. Invited Plenary Session: Data Driven Everything.
March 2018    Video (talk)    Video (debate)

Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. Invited Tutorial: Artificial Intelligence
September 2017    Slides (pdf)    Video

The Machine Learning in Brain Imaging Series at the National Institute of Mental Health. Invited (virtual) talk: Using EEG to Decode Semantics During an Artificial Language Learning Task
May 2020   Video

Podcasts

AI4Society Podcast
October 2020   Episode webpage

TWIML (This week in machine Learning)
August 2021   Episode webpage

NLP Highlights (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)
October 2020   Episode webpage

Teaching

Fall 2015
CSC 106: The Practice of Computer Science
Spring 2016
SENG 474/CSC 578: Data Mining Check out the projects from that class!
Fall 2016
SENG 474/CSC 578: Data Mining
Spring 2017
CSC 106: The Practice of Computer Science
Summer 2017
CSC 485E/SENG 480C/CSC 581A: Topics in Artificial Intelligence: "Natural Language Processing"
Spring 2018
SENG 474/CSC 578: Data Mining
Fall 2018
CSC 652: Machine Learning and the Brain
Fall 2019
CSC 652: Machine Learning and the Brain
Winter 2020
PSYCO 354: Foundations of Cognitive Science
Fall 2020
PSYCO 576: Machine Learning in Psychology and Neuroscience
Winter 2021
CMPUT 466/566: Introduction to Machine Learning
Fall 2021
CSC 652: Machine Learning and the Brain
Winter 2022
PSYCO 354: Foundations of Cognitive Science

Publications

I'm not maintaining this list anymore, except for papers behind a paywall. Please see my Google Scholar page.

Past and Current Students

Please see my lab webpage