Olivia Guest

Hi! I am an Assistant Professor in Computational Cognitive Science at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour and the School of Artificial Intelligence, at Radboud University, Netherlands.

My research interests comprise (meta)theoretical, critical, and radical perspectives on the neuro-, computational, and cognitive sciences broadly construed. Additionally, I am an Associate Editor-in-Chief for ReScience C and for the Journal of Open Source Software.

I am committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion in (open) science, e.g., promoting access to technical skills training — including the broader decolonisation of cognitive and computational sciences. Relatedly, Christina Bergmann and I maintain a list of underrepresented cognitive computational scientists.

Bio

I emigrated to the UK from Cyprus in 2006 to pursue an undergraduate degree in Computer Science (2009; University of York, UK). After that, I moved on to an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences (2010; University College London, UK). I then undertook a PhD in Psychological Sciences (2014; Birkbeck, UK), specifically on computational models for semantic memory.

Since obtaining my PhD, I have worked in labs at the University of Oxford, University College London, and as an independent scientist at a research centre in Cyprus. In 2020, I moved to the Netherlands to work with Andrea E. Martin, before starting as an Assistant Professor at the Radboud where I still work.

Mentoring

If you are interested in working with me, feel free to contact me. Prior to that, it might be worth taking a look at the following themes of research that currently interest me:

Critical perspectives on AI, its history, and its current state, including projects about artificial neural networks, sans hype.
(Meta)theory development in neuro-, cognitive, computational, and psychological sciences.
Human categorisation, and computational models thereof, from a perspective of what is lacking in our narrow framing of this human capacity.

Selected Articles

Guest, O. (2023). What makes a good theory, and how do we make a theory good?. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8fxds
Guest, O. & Martin, A. E. (2023). On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks. Computational Brain & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42113-022-00166-x
Erscoi, L., Kleinherenbrink, A., & Guest, O. (2023). Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/jqxb6
Forbes, S. H., Aneja, P., & Guest, O. (2022). The Myth of Normative Development. Infant and Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2393
Spanton, R. W. & Guest, O. (2022). Measuring Trustworthiness or Automating Physiognomy? A Comment on Safra, Chevallier, Grèzes, and Baumard (2020). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.08674
Birhane, A. & Guest, O. (2021). Towards Decolonising Computational Sciences. Women, Gender & Research. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v29i2.124899
Guest, O. & Martin, A. E. (2021). How Computational Modeling Can Force Theory Building in Psychological Science. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620970585
Barlas, P., Kyriakou, K., Guest, O., Kleanthous, S., & Otterbacher, J. (2021). To "See" is to Stereotype: Image Tagging Algorithms, Gender Recognition, and the Accuracy-Fairness Trade-off. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3432931
Whitaker, K. J. & Guest, O. (2020). #bropenscience is broken science. The Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4099011
Guest, O., Caso, A., & Cooper, R. P. (2020). On Simulating Neural Damage in Connectionist Networks. Computational Brain & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42113-020-00081-z
Guest, O. & Rougier, N. P. (2016). Dialogue: what is computational reproducibility?. IEEE CIS Newsletter on Cognitive and Developmental Systems.
Cooper, R. P. & Guest, O. (2014). Implementations are not specifications: specification, replication and experimentation in computational cognitive modeling. Cognitive Systems Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2013.05.001

CV

Feel free to contact me, if you require the most up-to-date version.