Alona Fyshe


Assistant Professor

Research Themes:  Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism, The Communicating Mind and Body

Alona Fyshe is an Assistant Professor in the Computing Science and Psychology Departments at the University of Alberta, is a fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. 

Alona received her BSc and MSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, and a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University. 

Alona uses machine learning to analyze brain images collected while people read, which allows her to study how humans represent the meaning they encounter in text, and how they combine words to understand higher-order meaning.  Alona also studies how computers learn to represent meaning when trained on text or images.  Alona has fused these two very different areas of study to discover connections between how computer models represent meaning, and how meaning is represented in the human brain.

Research Interests: Computational linguistics, semantics, machine learning, neuroscience

First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that UBC’s campuses are situated within the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and in the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples.


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