Computation and Cognition Symposium 2026

Thank you for your interest in CCC 2026. If you couldn't make it and didn't catch the livestream, you can watch the recordings below.

Join us for CCC 2026

The Computation and Cognition Symposium (CCS) is an interdisciplinary event exploring the scientific connections between artificial intelligence, human cognition, and real-world intelligent behaviour. CCS was first held in 2025 at Dalhousie University and aims to promote collaboration across fields studying intelligent behaviour in humans, animals, and machines.

CCS 2026 will focus on how advances in AI systems, cognitive science, and neuroscience co-evolve and inform one another, particularly as AI systems become increasingly embedded in scientific, clinical, and societal decision-making. Over a full day of invited talks, contributed posters, and networking, we will discuss how behavioural science and machine learning are adapting to their increasing integration into science and society.

This symposium offers opportunities to hear about current research from leading speakers, share your work, and connect with potential collaborators. We encourage participation from engineers, experimentalists, and practitioners working with intelligent systems.

Discussions will include topics in the following areas, as well as many others:

• Computational approaches to understanding intelligence in humans and AI
• Computational cognitive science
• Computational neuroscience
• Tool use, planning, and reasoning in humans and AI
• Human–AI interaction and AI-assisted creativity
• AI for understanding cognition and behaviour
• Development across biological and artificial systems
• Interpretable AI and biological representations

This event is open to all, whether you would like to present a poster, learn about current research, or simply attend and enjoy the conversations. The symposium is particularly relevant for researchers and practitioners interested in the design, evaluation, and deployment of AI systems that interact with human decision-making.

The symposium has concluded. If you'd like to be added to our mailing list for future events, please contact marta.kryven@dal.ca.

Call for Posters

Poster spots are limited and assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. To allocate space for your posters, we need to have your poster abstract in advance. If you wish to present a poster, you will need to indicate your poster title and approximate abstract during registration. Your abstract will be used to moderate submissions based on thematic fit.

Poster Dimensions: posters can be horizontal or vertical, with maximum dimensions of 30x40 or 40x30 inches.

Invited Speakers

Kelsey Allen

UBC

Kelsey Allen is a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind, and completed her PhD at MIT under the supervision of Josh Tenenbaum in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Dr. Allen studies cognitive science, machine learning, and robotics, with a focus on tool use and tool creation.

Brian Leahy

MIT

Dalhousie alumnus Brian Leahy is a postdoctoral associate in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab and the Computational Cognitive Science group in MIT. His work addresses age-related changes in the logical resources children bring to bear in their thinking and decision making. He has focused on the case study of modal operators, especially possibility operators: When do children start to use symbols that mark propositions as merely possible? His most recent project addresses how children use their understanding of what is possible to evaluate the probabilities of possible events.

Kohitij Kar

York University

Kohitij Kar is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at York University and a Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience. Previously, he was a research scientist in the lab of James DiCarlo at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jay Olson

University of Toronto

Dr. Jay Olson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. He did his graduate and postdoctoral training in Psychiatry at McGill University and Psychology at Harvard University. He leads the largest global studies on creativity and problematic smartphone use and has most recently studied the intersection of human and AI creativity.

Institutional Supporters

Dalhousie support provided by: Office of the President, Faculty of Science, Faculty of Computer Science, and Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Community and Outreach Partners

Interested in supporting CCS2026? Contact marta.kryven@dal.ca