Chris Hamblin

Timeline

April, 1993 - September, 2011

Just being a kid

Arlington, Massachusetts
September, 2011 - May, 2015

Tufts University

Somerville, Massachusetts — Double Major in Mathematics and Philosophy
October, 2012 - October, 2015

Bad & Blue

Boston, Massachusetts — Keyboardist for Bad and Blue, Jazz/HipHop band.
May, 2013 - Present

American Symphony of Soul

Boston, Massachusetts — Keyboardist for The American Symphony of Soul, R&B band.
July, 2013 - August 2015

STEM Camp

Medford, Massachusetts — Creator and lead teacher for a STEM summer camp for middle schoolers, focused on hands-on engineering projects.
November, 2015 - May 2017

Piano Van

New Zealand — Travelled around the islands with an upright piano in campervan, performing classical and jazz compositions as a street performer.
June, 2017 - June 2019

Stanford Cognitive Systems Neuroscience Lab

Palo Alto, California — Data analyst and software developer for a neuroscience lab focused on fMRI analyses of psychiatric disorders.
September, 2019 - May 2024

Harvard Vision Sciences Lab

Cambridge, Massachusetts — PhD student in a visual psychophysics and neuroscience lab. Work concerns deveoping methods for interpreting the innerworkings of neural networks and comparing their perceptual abilities to those of people.
August, 2024 - Present

Stealth Startup 🤫

Cambridge, Massachusetts — Founding research scientist at stealth startup I'm not supposed to talk about here. Roughly, we work program induction in the low-data regime.

Science

Dissertation

Dissertation on feature construction in vision models.

Feature Inhibition

How inhibitory weights enable the construction of selective features.

Code

Feature Accentuation

Image-seeded feature visualizations reveal what a feature sees in an image.

Code

Optimizing for feature combinations

Activation maximization can also tell us what networks can and can’t represent.

Circuit Pruning

Automated circuit extraction in CNNs.

Code · Talk

VISCNN

A tool for Visualizing Interpretable Subgraphs in CNNs.

Code · Video

Music

Eurydice — Chris Hamblin Quartet

Chris Hamblin (piano) · Bri Aronow (saxophone) · Otto Briner (bass) · Dan Fortunato (drums)

Swept Up — The American Symphony of Soul

Kristen Ransom (vocals) · Andrew Summerfield (alto sax) · Alek Razdan (tenor sax) · Will Archibald (trumpet) · Chris Hamblin (rhodes) · Jackson Clawson (organ) · Alex Mijailovic (guitar) · Mary Glaser (perc) · Dan Fortunato (drums) · Jesse Brotter (bass)

Bad and Blue — Bad and Blue

Tammara Amber Gary (vocals) · Cameron Flowers (vocals) · Lela Ramani (guitar) · Chris Hamblin (piano) · Bri Aronow (sax) · Jesse Brotter (bass) · Harry Meyerson (drums)

Trust the Process — Tim Hall

Tim Hall (vocals, sax) · Chris Hamblin (keys) · Daniel Moreno (drums)

Jam 1 — Basement Boys

Blue Bird — single

Ham at Granoff — Ham

Chris Hamblin (piano) · Bri Aronow (sax) · Jesse Brotter (bass) · Jonathan Gilad (drums)

Photography

Writing

Motivation

Follow your dreams, or whatever.

Jontu

“Of course the machine has no idea what the neuron firings mean… But the connection is there and the systems are very flexible…”

Reincarnation

In the end you always find yourself in the same place, in a waiting room.

Undergrad thesis

Bayesian Predictive Coding & Phenomenology.

Vans

I’ve spent a lot of time living in camper vans instead of a house. It started when I was a street performer in New Zealand. The first van was fairly… minimalist.