Welcome to my web page.

I’m Ali Cy, an MEng doing machine learning at MIT, advised by Kaiming He. In undergrad, I also did research under Vincent Sitzmann and Amir Zamir.

I am interested in understanding unsupervised, emergent intelligence that has developed from scratch. Such intelligences surround us in daily life: human intelligence, animal intelligence, and perhaps even plant intelligence. More than the details of how they work, I want to understand the necessary, general conditions under which they may develop.

I am working in unsupervised vision and visual reasoning. An aspirational interest of mine is learning through interactions with an environment (evolution/alife, reinforcement learning, etc.)

Please reach me at califyn@mit.edu.

[Last updated: Nov. ’25]

selected publications

Coming soon!