Ellie Pavlick is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Brown University and a Research Scientist at Google Deepmind. She received her PhD from University of Pennsylvania in 2017, where her focus was on paraphrasing and lexical semantics. Her work focuses on computational models of language (currently, primarily LLMs) and its connections to the study of language and cognition more broadly. Ellie leads the language understanding and representation (LUNAR) lab, which collaborates with Brown’s Robotics and Visual Computing labs and with the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences.
Summit 2025
Thursday ·
8:00pm
We gather some of today’s most original thinkers to open the field of conversation. Each brings a different lens — plural intelligences, collective wisdom, philosophical rupture, planetary scale, and emergent meaning. Together, they won’t offer conclusions but provocations, setting the stage for the Summit as a space to ask not only what intelligence is, but how we want to live with it — me, we, and us.
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Friday ·
4:30pm
What if meaning isn’t a property of words, but a structure lurking between them? Ellie Pavlick probes the hidden architecture of language models, showing how meaning emerges from internal vectors, grounded semantics, and compositional patterns rather than magic. Her recent work suggests neural networks may exhibit symbolic-like abstraction even without explicit symbols, challenging how we define thinking in both machines and minds.
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