virati.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

It's often easier for me to describe my research vision by the methods I want to use: toy-dynamical models in networks, model predictive control, nonlinear + optimal control, SSM AI, applied math + expertise-derived models to a priori constrain solution spaces, etc.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Most people probably aren’t tracking this but Senate Republicans just started an all-night voting marathon that will allow them to gut Medicaid and increase child hunger while giving handouts to billionaires like Elon Musk.

submitted 6 days ago • 714 comments

“What is both surprising and alarming is how many research-supporting organizations and institutions outside of the federal government have immediately capitulated to these bans – despite the fact that it’s not even clear whether these orders are legal.“ scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/02/19/d...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

One of the most important facts in deep brain stimulation that we don't acknowledge - the therapy has always been closed-loop. medium.com/neuroenginee...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Yep, project manager for #NSF Small Business Innovation Research grants was let go. These grants are the gap between founding and #venturecapital so vital to #innovation and US competitiveness

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I love writing. I struggle with it, at multiple levels. But I still love writing.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

I am hiring: PhD students, postdocs, admin personnel. Email me if you know somebody that may be interested in joining us in Cologne! 👇👇 Please RT for reach! 🙏🙏

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

CDC source: “We just had word that all our fellows and post doc staff are laid off effective immediately. The famous Epidemic Intelligence Service, aka the Disease Detectives, is no more. That’s 1260 staff. They are calling this ‘Phase 1’.”

submitted 12 days ago • 599 comments

I miss thunderstorms.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

Very pleased to share our recent work, in which we use LLMs for automated discovery of interpretable models of animal behavior 🪰🐀🕵️‍♀️ that take the form of Python programs 🐍 See below for a summary of key results by @pcastr.bsky.social!

submitted 16 days ago • 4 comments

BBC just released damning research on AI assistants' news accuracy. Results: 51% of AI responses had significant issues. 19% introduced errors when citing BBC. 13% misquoted or made up BBC content entirely. 🤐🤐 www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/... via @ezraeeman.bsky.social

submitted 16 days ago • 60 comments

What will it take to do good science these next 5 years? Are researchers prepared for it? Will academic and industry approaches bifurcate?

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

“‘Science can and should as a community organise itself to maximise its ability to act collectively, ethically and – when necessary – politically.’ The scientific community needs to speak up – not just for the sake of science, but of human decency, dignity and morality.”

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Very excited to announce that I've joined @brighamandwomens.bsky.social and @harvardmed.bsky.social as a Research Fellow (Postdoc). Feels great to bring back some industry skillsets to academia :) Time to get back to "The Work"

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

In clinical trials of new treatments, when the treatment is clearly and obviously immediately effective it is sometimes considered unethical to continue to withhold it from the control group. Pretty sure we passed that milestone about a decade ago with basic income experiments.

submitted 386 days ago • 41 comments

@suryaganguli.bsky.social gives great talk at LLM workshop at Berkley -LLM<->brain is still a new topic, less progress so far than LLM<->vision -lets train LLM foundation models of specific brain systems and then reverse engineer them -emerging paradigm: read-write experiments in brains+machines

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

The National Science foundation has just updated their FAQ to say they are complying with the court order and has restored access to funds and the ACM$ platform new.nsf.gov/executive-or...

submitted 24 days ago • 11 comments

In the face of a relentless attack by the president & allies on the public sector, we need an opposition that can articulate support for the value of the civil service; the value of people who take jobs to help others, not to make a profit; the value of government initiative for public betterment.

submitted 24 days ago • 4 comments

One reason I love twitter - it connects people together in the idea space while ignoring all the challenges of location, affiliation, etc. I'm revisiting this figure from my dissertation and excited to see that we're reframing neuropsychiatry into "landscapes" and "control"

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

submitted 27 days ago • 3 comments

Going to do a more formal introduction for my BlueSkionians, but in the meantime this is a pretty good snapshot of my approach virati.medium.com/a-quick-comm...

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

It’s official: all funding requests made on Tuesday by postdocs for their salaries have been unilaterally rejected by NSF.

submitted 27 days ago • 73 comments

i think it is important to say that the open and explicit racism of the president and the vice president isn’t just uncouth or “controversial” but a direct attack on tens of millions of americans and a dereliction of their duty to represent the entire country

submitted 27 days ago • 2305 comments

This flight was from Wichita - that's my hometown. This is heartbreaking, but completely expected after Conservatives + Trump deliberately broke the Federal Government last week.

submitted 27 days ago • 2 comments

Revisiting these beautiful figures from Izhikevich after a decade hits hard... www.izhikevich.org/publications...

submitted 28 days ago • 2 comments

A colleague today asked about Gaussian Processes on a sphere. Like spatial autocorrelation on the globe. I asked @avehtari.bsky.social. There are papers! This problem common enough to be worth having a case study I think? (1) Theory doi.org/10.1007/s112... (2) Application doi.org/10.48550/arX...

submitted 30 days ago • 6 comments

🎉 Thrilled to announce that our course on Neural Field Theory & Brain Networks has been accepted for #OHBM2025! Third year teaching computational neuroscience at OHBM. Can't wait to explore brain dynamics in Brisbane! @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social @drbreaky.bsky.social @johndgriffiths.bsky.social

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

Medicine is Control Theory on a massive stack of N=1. We need rigor, but engineering rigor is a better, more robust model than inefficient sample sizes and "big data".

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

This is nauseating and life threatening. I hope someone asks RFK Jr about this tomorrow.

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

With all the excitement around RL atm, I think it's important to highlight links with Optimal Control: arxiv.org/pdf/1912.03513

submitted 30 days ago • 1 comment