Xiuye ‘Sue’ Chen

Systems

I have always been fascinated by the way we learn and adapt to complex environments.

A few ideas I keep coming back to: thinking in systems (Meadows), representations of concepts, machine learning as an analogy for human learning and education, and — lately — keeping tabs on the fast-evolving landscape of frontier AI.

In terms of application domains, I am interested in systems neuroscience (with collaborations in connectomics), AI interpretability, complexity science (evolution and emergence), and independent AI consulting in drug discovery.

Before Yale: I led a multi-lab project mapping brain-wide activity in the larval zebrafish — a whole vertebrate brain at single-neuron resolution (Chen et al., 2018). I was a research scientist at Amazon Alexa AI, where I shipped deep-learning acoustic models onto Echo devices and the Astro robot, with patents on acoustic event detection. PhD in neuroscience.