Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year:

www.gao-unit.com/join-us/

If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply!

I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮

MackeLab has grown! 🎉 Warm welcome to 5(!) brilliant and fun new PhD students / research scientists who joined our lab in the past year — we can’t wait to do great science and already have good times together! 🤖🧠 Meet them in the thread 👇 1/7

Having fun facilitating this amazing group of young Profs at the #Neuro4Pros workshop with @kordinglab.bsky.social and @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer.

Watch out world: this is the next generation of leaders!

compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

New preprint: SBI with foundation models!
Tired of training or tuning your inference network, or waiting for your simulations to finish? Our method NPE-PF can help: It provides training-free simulation-based inference, achieving competitive performance with orders of magnitude fewer simulations! ⚡️

Satellitenaufnahme einer Flusslandschaft mit darübergelegtem Text: „Monatliche Talkreihe – Wissen für alle!? – 25.06.2025 · 19:00 Uhr · Online · HIIG“. Oben rechts steht „Digitaler Salon“. Unten rechts ein Pfeilsymbol als Weiterleitung.

Grafik mit der Frage: „Wie kann komplexes Wissen verständlich vermittelt werden?“ Darunter zwei Stichpunkte: – Wissenstransfer soll helfen, komplizierte Sachverhalte und Zusammenhänge auch außerhalb der Fachwelt zugänglicher zu machen. – Doch wie viel Vereinfachung ist erlaubt? Können und sollten alle Expert*innen für alles sein? Unten links steht „Digitaler Salon“, unten rechts „2/3“.

25.6., 19 Uhr: #Wissen für alle!? Im #DigitalerSalon diskutieren Sascha Friesike (@weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social‬), @auschulz.bsky.social und Lennart Glaser, wie #Wissenstransfer in einer immer komplexer werdenden Welt gelingen kann.

👉 Live am HIIG & im Stream: www.hiig.de/events/digit...

Postdoc position: Computational methods for neurodegeneration research - VIB About the labs The Verstreken Lab and the Gonçalves Lab are based in Leuven, Belgium and part of the

Exciting project in Parkinson's disease! Patrik Verstreken's lab (verstrekenlab.sites.vib.be) and my lab are looking for a postdoc to develop and apply ML methods to the analysis of exciting brain-on-chip data. Please spread the word!

More details at: jobs.vib.be/j/110908/pos...

Crowdsourcing this: what are the best examples of scaling laws in foundation models for neuroscience? My top 3 examples: Ctrl+Labs, Sato et al., Mineault et al. @colehurwitz.bsky.social , @mehdiazabou.bsky.social , @nandahkrishna.bsky.social , @averyryoo.bsky.social, @tyrellturing.bsky.social ?

Thanks so much to our fantastic collaborators from the @ramdya.bsky.social lab, the whole @mackelab.bsky.social team, but in particular @vetterj.bsky.social, @rdgao.bsky.social, & @jakhmack.bsky.social, & Gonçalves lab's very own
@ppjgoncalves.bsky.social 🙏🥂 Thanks also to our reviewers & editor!

We apply our masked VAE approach to drosophila 🪰walking behavior, a macaque 🐒reach task & a synthetic dataset with access to the ground truth.

We propose calibration checks to evaluate the models’ uncertainty estimates, to avoid making confidently wrong predictions.

Check out the paper for more 🙂

We use masked VAEs to address two model desiderata in one model:

1. jointly modeling conditional distributions that are commonly targeted in neuroscience (e.g., encoding 🐭➡️🧠and decoding 🧠 ➡️🐭) and

2. accounting for low-dimensional dynamics underlying both neural activity and behavior. 🌀

Thanks so much for the shout-out, and congrats on your exciting work!! 🎉 🙂

Also, a good reminder to share that our work is now out in Cell Reports 🙏🎊

⬇️

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Another step toward a foundation model of the mouse brain: "Neural Encoding and Decoding at Scale (NEDS)"

Trained on neural and behavioral data from 70+ mice, NEDS achieves state-of-the-art prediction of behavior (decoding) and neural responses (encoding) on held-out animals. 🐀

It seems as good a time as any to share that I've accepted a new job as Lecturer of Cognitive Neuroscience (equivalent to assistant prof) at the University of Manchester in the UK!

I dusted off the blog to say a bit more about why I'm excited for this move:
tomdonoghue.github.io/ms/2025/04/1...

Very late, but had a 🔥 time at my first Cosyne presenting my work with @nandahkrishna.bsky.social, Ximeng Mao, @mattperich.bsky.social, and @glajoie.bsky.social on real-time neural decoding with hybrid SSMs. Keep an eye out for a preprint (hopefully) soon 👀

#Cosyne2025 @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

I'll be giving a talk at this👇workshop tomorrow #Cosyne2025 @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

In response to the @thetransmitter.bsky.social article by @tyrellturing.bsky.social & Eva Dyer (tinyurl.com/veb7p88f) I'll be talking about:

How do "foundation"/AI models help us (experimenters) study the brain?

Two more days until our workshop 🥳@cosynemeeting.bsky.social #Cosyne2025

Object-centric neural representations across species 🐒🐁🕷️🐝🖥️

Check out our homepage: toliaslab.org/workshop/cos...

Excellent speakers include @dyamins.bsky.social @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social & many more 🙌

LDNS ➡️ proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...

Masked VAEs ➡️ www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Workshop program ➡️ neurofm-workshop.github.io

Already a bit nostalgic as this will most likely be my last conference as a PhD student — time to slowly wrap up 🎒⌛

Looking forward to presenting our work on Latent Diffusion for Neural Spiking data tonight—Poster 1-108

& experience discussions on scaling in neuroscience firsthand at the foundation model workshop, where I'll talk both about our work on masked VAEs & latent diffusion for neural & behavioral data

The @mackelab.bsky.social is represented at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #cosyne2025 in Montreal

with 3 posters, 2 workshop talks, and a main conference contributed talk (for the very first time in Mackelab history 🎉)!

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨
We’ve just launched openretina, an open-source framework for collaborative retina modeling across datasets and species.
A 🧵👇 (1/9)

sbi 0.24.0 is out! 🎉 This comes with important new features:
- 🎯 Score-based i.i.d sampling
- 🔀 Simultaneous estimation of multiple discrete and continuous parameters or data.
- 📊: mini-sbibm for quick benchmarking.

Just in time for our 1-week SBI hackathon starting tomorrow---stay tuned for more!

New work co-led by @ppjgoncalves.bsky.social introduces a powerful new approach to model conditional distributions of neural and behavioral data using masked variational autoencoders.
Congratulations to @auschulz.bsky.social‬ et al.
www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2...

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

For our "Automated Assessment of Teaching Quality" project, we are looking for two PhD students: one in educational/cognitive sciences or a related domain (uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...) and one in machine learning (uni-tuebingen.de/en/faculties...). Please apply and reach me out for details!

ZAPBench ZAPBench evaluates how well different models can predict the activity of over 70,000 neurons in a novel larval zebrafish dataset.

⚡️ Excited to introduce ZAPBench, our #ICLR2025 spotlight: The Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark measures progress in predicting neural activity within an entire vertebrate brain (70k+ neurons!)

Explore interactive visualizations, datasets, code + paper: google-research.github.io/zapbench

🧠🧪

Re-posting is appreciated: We have a fully funded PhD position in CMC lab @cmc-lab.bsky.social (at @tudresden_de). You can use forms.gle/qiAv5NZ871kv... to send your application and find more information. Deadline is April 30. Find more about CMC lab: cmclab.org and email me if you have questions.

Hiring announcement: ELLIS Institute Tübingen is looking for ML Researchers & Engineers for Open-Source AI Tutoring (m/f/d). The image features a white background with bold black text and the colorful ELLIS logo at the bottom.

🚀 We’re hiring! Join Bernhard Schölkopf & me at @ellisinsttue.bsky.social to push the frontier of #AI in education!

We’re building cutting-edge, open-source AI tutoring models for high-quality, adaptive learning for all pupils with support from the Hector Foundation.

👉 forms.gle/sxvXbJhZSccr...

After just sharing the first scientific thread... I'm wondering what it is called here. What is the equivalent of a Tweetprint?

I'm a bit late in the game here, anything picking steam?

Skeetprint?
If there isn't any... I kind of like "science flutter"

8) Check out the preprint for more! 🔝

Thanks so much to Stefano, Aman, and Sam for driving this project and opening it up for such a fun collaboration with the Macke- and Gonçalves labs! 🙏🙌