"AI amplifies whatever is already there. Good discipline becomes great output. No discipline becomes technical debt at machine speed. Anthropic chose a direction. Go faster. Have Claude check Claude. And when it breaks, go faster still." substack.com/home/post/p-...
1/ One of the issues of fully amortized inference / pretrained simulator-based inference is that you are stuck with the "prior" training distribution. What if you change your mind after training?
In PriorGuide, one of our papers at ICLR this week, we allow the prior to be changed at runtime!
Joao Barbos - Distributed representations from broadcast local comp
Large-scale recordings reveal that behaviorally relevant variab Monday, April 20, 2026 - FRESK PariSanté Campus (2-10 Rue d'Oradour-sur-Glane\, 75015 Pari
There is still time to apply to join our lab as a PhD student
At @kavlintnu.bsky.social 💻🧠🇳🇴
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
Apply before May 6.
I caught a grad student at the movie theatre last Sunday. I take my kids there to see Super Mario Galaxy and I see a grad student three rows up. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him he either leaves now no questions asked or I speak with his dissertation chair come Monday morning. He left.
Massive Attack / Tom Waits - Boots on the Ground www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-57...
A masterpiece by a beloved team! Congratulations 🎉@danielavalerio.bsky.social
***4-year Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology now available at Oxford!***
Open to all areas of Psychology, including Cognitive/Behavioural Neuroscience.
PhD in last three years, or be about to submit (some exceptions apply).
Deadline: 21st May.
www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/vac...
The #ERC just announced new rules!
erc.europa.eu/news-events/...
If you got a B score before, you’re blocked for 2 years (instead of 1). A C score means 3-year exclusion.
This applies to the 2027 call for now, but I’d expect this to stick. Important for anyone planning to apply this round!
Come learn some programming with a healthy helping of critical thinking; something no genAI can take away from you :)
Also Prague is great fun ;)
My institution is offering training to students on "building your personal brand." This feels yuck to me... Am I being naive/idealistic? What happened to the highest ideals of the academy, the impersonal quest for truth, and all that?
Very excited to announce that my textbook on “Working Memory” is now available for pre-order!
shop.elsevier.com/books/workin...
A few thoughts
The supply of blood to brain tissue is thought to depend on the overall neural activity in that tissue, and this dependence is thought to differ across brain regions and across brain states. However, studies supporting these views have measured neural activity as a bulk quantity and related it to blood supply following disparate events in different regions. Here we measure fluctuations in neuronal activity and blood volume across the mouse brain, and find that their relationship is consistent across brain states and brain regions but differs in two opposing brainwide neural populations. Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) revealed that whisking, a marker of arousal, is associated with brainwide fluctuations in blood volume. Simultaneous fUSI and Neuropixels recordings showed that neurons that increase activity with whisking have distinct haemodynamic response functions compared with those that decrease activity. Their summed contributions predicted blood volume across states.Brainwide Neuropixels recordings revealed that these opposing populations coexist in the entire brain. Their differing contributions to blood volume largely explain the apparent differences in blood volume fluctuations across regions. The mouse brain thus contains two neural populations with opposite relations to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply, which together account for brainwide fluctuations in blood volume.
How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states!
Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A
@uclbrainscience.bsky.social
Ah got it! Note my shit post was about real experiments not what ML folks call numerical simulations 😉
CCN?
Comp neuro reviewer asking for more experiments
I think we finally made really significant progress on the biggest unsolved "developmental AI" problem: learning from human-scale data. Key idea: zero-shot world models that support concept extraction via approximate causal inference. amazing collab w/ @mcxfrank.bsky.social @khaiaw.bsky.social
Interesting study (which I admittedly haven't read past this thread!) but the fact that the conspiracies contradict each other is not the strongest argument in my opinion. It's not that basic logic is given, people can very well hold contradictory beliefs
Physicist has written a fascinating big beautiful paper.Let’s not be afraid to call it what it is - groundbreaking.
arxiv.org/abs/2603.21852
Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto
Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-co...
New preprint! 🧠
How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli?
By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis
"From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Yes there are nice points raised here but am I the only one getting tired of the ratio of pieces giving advice on how academic moms can carry the workload versus pieces on how institutions/funders/collaborators etc can make the workload more bearable? 🤷🏼♀️
I wish I could help, but I'm really not the right person. My guess is that it is highly dependent on the country you're based in, specific research topics etc
Today I am relaunching my newsletter as Neural Flows, inspired by my forthcoming book "Brain Flows"
The newsletter asks: How does the improvised symphony of flows inside our heads generate our minds?
Check out the intro post to the new newsletter here: open.substack.com/pub/neuralfl...
And cauda, tail :)
A foundation model trained on 36M cells across 8 species creates a universal embedding space for cell types—no fine-tuning needed for new data. It recovers developmental lineages and cell functions it was never explicitly trained on.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11....
damn aaron swartz tried to warn everybody about sam altman
Academic friends,
It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region.
A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions.
Please read & sign if you agree:
sites.google.com/view/protect...
#IranWar
If you need a method to infer causality from neural data, even when the signal is short, check our recent paper:
Paper: joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...
Code: github.com/CMC-lab/Tran...
