Thomas Serre
· ProfessorBrown University · Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences
Active 2000–2026
Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.
About
Dr. Thomas Serre is a Professor in Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences and in Computer Science at Brown University. He is also an affiliate of the Carney Institute for Brain Science and serves as the Faculty Director of the Center for Computation & Visualization, as well as the Associate Director of the Center for Computational Brain Science. Additionally, he holds an International Chair in Artificial Intelligence within the ANR-3IA Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute in France. Dr. Serre earned his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from MIT in 2006 and an MSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Télécom Bretagne in France in 2000. His research focuses on understanding the neural computations that support visual perception, working at the intersection of biological and artificial vision.
Research topics
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Science
- Machine Learning
- Engineering
- Computer vision
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Control engineering
- Human–computer interaction
Selected publications
Beyond the feedforward sweep: feedback computations in the visual cortex
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 97 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingVisual perception involves the rapid formation of a coarse image representation at the onset of visual processing, which is iteratively refined by late computational processes. These early versus late time windows approximately map onto feedforward and feedback processes, respectively. State-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, the main engine behind recent machine vision successes, are feedforward architectures. Their successes and limitations provide critical information regarding which v…
From prediction to understanding: Will AI foundation models transform brain science?
Neuron · 2025-10-22 · 4 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingBetter artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology
Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2025-12-01 · 3 citations
articleSenior authorTracking Without Re-recognition in Humans and Machines
arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021 · 3 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingImagine trying to track one particular fruitfly in a swarm of hundreds. Higher biological visual systems have evolved to track moving objects by relying on both appearance and motion features. We investigate if state-of-the-art deep neural networks for visual tracking are capable of the same. For this, we introduce PathTracker, a synthetic visual challenge that asks human observers and machines to track a target object in the midst of identical-looking "distractor" objects. While humans effortle…
Feature binding in biological and artificial vision
Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2025-09-05 · 2 citations
reviewOpen accessSenior author
Recent grants
Frequent coauthors
- 3217 shared
L. Li
- 2743 shared
S. De Cecco
Radboud University Nijmegen
- 2575 shared
T. Beau
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
- 2526 shared
B. Trocmé
Laboratoire AstroParticule et Cosmologie
- 2432 shared
L. Roos
Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies
- 2431 shared
S. Trincaz-Duvoid
Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies
- 2430 shared
J. Ocariz
Université Paris Cité
- 2428 shared
M. Ridel
Université Paris Cité
Awards & honors
- PAMI Helmholtz Prize for significant impact on computer visi…
- NSF Early Career Award
- DARPA’s Young Faculty Award and Director’s Award
Similar researchers at Brown University
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Thomas Serre
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup