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aribenjamin.bsky.social
Computational neuroscientist in the connectionist tradition. https://aribenjamin.github.io/ (Postdoc with Tony Zador, PhD with Konrad Kording)
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Thanks to all of the NIHers and their friends who reached out to me. I am still here (DM me or Signal jeremymberg.78) I still have a very incomplete picture but based on what I have been told, the damage to NIH and to many wonderful people who work(ed) there is/was impossible for me to imagine 1/n

submitted 11 days ago • 8 comments

The earliest studies on necessary and sufficient neural populations were performed on simple invertebrate circuits. In her latest column, @neurograce.bsky.social asks if this logic still serves us as we tackle more sophisticated outputs. www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.

submitted 28 days ago • 126 comments

Resist. Here is our lab's values statement: www.ncclab.ca/values

submitted 28 days ago • 3 comments

In 3D space, a sphere can touch 12 other identical spheres without overlapping. In 24-dimensional space, this number is 196,560 (!) For noisy neural codes, this means there are a LOT of distinguishable directions you could point a vector www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicia...

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

📢 Apply now for the 7-week #Mathematics #SummerSchool in London! You will develop mathematics skills and intuition necessary to enter the #TheoreticalNeuroscience or #MachineLearning field. ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/gatsby/study-and-work/gatsby-bridging-programme Please help spread the word!

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments

One of the ideas I'm most excited by is 'deliberative polling'. The ideas of Audrey Tang @audreyt.org and the Computational Democracy project are inspiring; github.com/compdemocracy AI *could* be part of the solution to our failing democracies – and not the problem – if we just design it that way.

submitted 84 days ago • 1 comment

I was taught that bio's Central Dogma was DNA->RNA->protein. Apparently this is not what Crick meant – and (as usual) it's Watson's fault we learned it. Crick wrote, "If you intend to discuss Jim’s [incorrect] version, I strongly suggest you call it ‘Watson’s Dogma." press.asimov.com/articles/crick

submitted 87 days ago • 0 comments

Attending NAISYS at CSHL this week? Come learn about how neural networks are ensembles of tiny little classifiers we call Neural Tangent Experts. A version for AI audiences was just accepted as a spotlight paper at NeurIPS 🔦: arxiv.org/abs/2408.17394 But what might this mean for neuroscience?

submitted 154 days ago • 0 comments

My self-advice for writing grants is to write each sentence in the voice of David Attenborough. Good writing is a story. A story has an arc. A story has a characters. A story has resolution. The best stories, though, are also narrated by a kind British man with a passion for nature and education.

submitted 414 days ago • 1 comment