Who


Francisco Pereira. If you would like to contact me, try the most obvious address at the most obvious commercial provider.
There are other places where you can find me online: LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon. I may not have much to say, though!

Where

I lead the Machine Learning Core at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Prior to this, I was a researcher at Medical Imaging Technologies, Siemens Healthcare, where I managed the Computational Neuroscience program. I was also the PI of a team in the IARPA Knowledge Representation in Neural Systems program. I was a postdoc in the Botvinick Lab (and a frequent lurker in the Computational Memory Lab) at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. I got my Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at CMU, working with Tom Mitchell and Geoff Gordon. I was also a student in the graduate training program of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, working in collaboration with the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. I got my undergraduate degree at the Computer Science Department of the University of Porto, in Portugal.

What

My primary role is leading the NIMH Machine Learning Core, a research group that I started in 2018. The mission of the Machine Learning Core is to support researchers in the NIMH and NIDA intramural research programs who want to address research problems in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, using statistics and machine learning approaches. We do this by consulting with individual researchers and guiding them in the use of the appropriate tools and methods, or by taking on the analysis process ourselves, if this is more expedient. In parallel, we are a machine learning research group and, as such, develop new methods and analysis approaches, motivated by the needs of researchers or by the practical possibilities arising from advances in the field. In general, I am very interested in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment human capability, in domains such as scientific discovery or decision making.

My main interest within cognitive (neuro)science is in the question of how semantic knowledge is represented in the brain, and is evoked and transformed by language. I have worked on methods to extract semantic information from text corpora and combine it with structured knowledge databases, in order to build models of human performance on various semantic tasks. I have also worked on methods to relate models of semantic mental processes to brain imaging data, validating those models through brain decoding tasks.

Publications, preprints, and software from our research group

(please see my Google Scholar for more citation details, or MLC for other publications by members of the group where I am not a co-author)

preprints under review software packages
papers about methods and tools papers about applications

Prior publications

(from industry, postdoc, or graduate school)
  • "Reproducibility Distinguishes Conscious from Nonconscious Neural Representations"
    Schurger A., Pereira F., Treisman A., Cohen J.D.
    Science, 1 January 2010 327: 97-99
  • "Machine learning classifiers and fMRI: a tutorial overview"
    Pereira F., Mitchell T., Botvinick M..
    NeuroImage, Volume 45, Issue 1, Supplement 1, March 2009, Pages S199-S209
  • "Beyond Brain Blobs:
    Machine Learning Classifiers as Instruments for Analyzing Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data"
    Pereira F.
    Ph.D. thesis, CMU-CS-07-175
    Computer Science Department and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, December 2007
    []
    Coming soon...
  • "Closed-form supervised dimensionality reduction with generalized linear models"
    Rish I., Grabarnik G., Cecchi G., Pereira F., Gordon G.
    International Conference on Machine Learning, 2007
  • "The Support Vector Decomposition Machine"
    Pereira F., Gordon G.
    International Conference on Machine Learning, 2006
  • "Exploring predictive and reproducible modeling with the single-subject FIAC data set"
    Chen X., Pereira F., Lee W., Strother S., Mitchell T.
    Human Brain Mapping
  • "Learning to Decode Cognitive States from Brain Images"
    Mitchell T., Hutchinson R., Niculescu S., Pereira F., Wang X., Just M., Newman S.
    Machine Learning Journal, Vol. 57, Issue 1-2, pp. 145-175, 2004
  • "Detecting Significant Multidimensional Spatial Clusters"
    Neill D., Moore A.,Pereira F., Mitchell T.
    Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems 2004
  • "Classifying Instantaneous Cognitive States from fMRI Data"
    Mitchell T., Hutchinson R., Niculescu S., Pereira F., Wang X., Just M., Newman S.
    Proceedings of AMIA 2003 (Best Foundational Paper Award)
  • "Concise, Intelligible, and Approximate Profiling of Multiple Classes"
    Valdes-Perez R., Pericliev V. and Pereira F.
    International Journal of Human Computer Systems, 53(3):411-436, 2000
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