Happy to see the main paper from my postdoc finally out!

Biology is full of coconuts. 🥥

Scientists are always doing what's interesting to them, but I think that's the wrong approach. We should be going after all the stuff that bores us. Because it's actually not boring at all once you get into it, and it's precisely the things we think are going to be boring that open our minds.

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

The field of #neuromorphics is lacking *accessible*, *intuitive*, and *practical* introductions. Ramashish Gaurav, Petruț Antoniu Bogdan, and I are setting out to fix this with a book on Practical Spiking Neural Networks! ✅ Any and all contributions are welcome! 💕 Early access at: snnbook.net

One of the underrated papers this year: "Small Batch Size Training for Language Models: When Vanilla SGD Works, and Why Gradient Accumulation Is Wasteful" (arxiv.org/abs/2507.07101) (I can confirm this holds for RLVR, too! I have some experiments to share soon.)

Very neat approach to mapping biological circuits to neuromorphic HW! Had the pleasure of providing some feedback to Suraj Honnuraiah on an earlier draft of the paper, great to see it finally in print! (I actually missed that it already came out in Oct) Link to paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How does the structure of a neural circuit shape its function? @neuralreckoning.bsky.social & I explore this in our new preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🤖🧠🧪 🧵1/9

With Masashi launching his new lab, we’ll be recruiting a new postdoc in the Oldenburg Lab. Work: high-precision multiphoton holography, neural coding, motor cortex circuits, all-optical physiology. If you’re interested, just reach out.

1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs. 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025... Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social

When you join a lab to do some voltage imaging

Last week was my last at Rutgers University. After nearly 5 years in the US, I am moving to the Netherlands to join Innatera, a neuromorphic computing startup pushing the boundaries of what we can do with ultra-efficient hardware running SNNs for edge computing.

There was never any point to having reference letters. That's why we've all started using AI to do this nonesense task. References should only be used for short-listed candidates for important positions/awards, and ideally, be done via a call to get the most honest opinion possible.

Psst - neuromorphic folks. Did you know that you can solve the SHD dataset with 90% accuracy using only 22 kb of parameter memory by quantising weights and delays? Check out our preprint with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social and @danakarca.bsky.social, or read the TLDR below. 👇🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2510.27434

With my great advisors and colleagues, @achterbrain.bsky.social @zhe @danakarca.bsky.social @neural-reckoning.org, we show that if heterogeneous axonal delays (imprecise) can capture the essential temporal structure of a task, spiking networks do not need precise synaptic weights to perform well.

Really enjoyed reading this short opinion piece by Tim O'Leary. I think it echoes the classic Feynman quote "what I cannot create I do not understand". I think engineering approaches such as neuromorphic computing will prove fundamental to scientific understanding of how biological brains work

Reminder this is happening this Wed/Thu. Free spiking neural network conference - registration required (see below).

My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep www.nature.com/articles/s41...

MSR NYC is hiring senior researchers in AI, both broadly in AI/ML & in specific areas (post-training, test-time scaling, modular transfer learning, science of deep learning). aka.ms/msrnyc-jobs We're reviewing on a rolling basis, interviews in Nov/Dec. Please apply here: tinyurl.com/MSRNYCjob

Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

Check out my new article: vitalstatistics.kareemcarr.com/p/a-simple-e...

Message for participants of the #SNUFA 2025 spiking neural network workshop. We got almost 60 awesome abstract submissions, and we'd now like your help to select which ones should be offered talks. Follow the "abstract voting" link at snufa.net/2025/ to take part. It should take <15m. Thanks! ❤️

A thought-provoking perspective from the visionary @giacomoi.bsky.social, calling for neuromorphic computing to return to its root: fundamental neuroscience; an inspiring vision for the future of NeuroAI 🤩

Travel awards are available for undergraduate students looking to attend #Cosyne25! The application is short, and the deadline is Nov 12. @cosynemeeting.bsky.social Application: shorturl.at/6NEyk More info: www.cosyne.org/travel-grants (1/2)

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hey ephys friends! I've been teaching electrophysiology for a few years now, and this summer while teaching at CSHL I started building an interactive simulation of a full patch-clamp amplifier circuit to help explain electronics to my students. Sharing it here in case anyone finds it useful!

The CTRL-Labs decoding model paper is out! Saw this presented at Cosyne this year, very cool to see it out. I would say this is the clearest demonstration of scaling laws in neural decoding to-date. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪

New preprint! What happens if you add neuromodulation to spiking neural networks and let them go wild with it? TLDR: it can improve performance especially in challenging sensory processing tasks. Explainer thread below. 🤖🧠🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Job post alert!👩‍🔬 Postdoctoral fellow in CompNeuro/ML in the Artificial and Biological Computation lab at NYU (csavin.wixsite.com/savinlab). Exciting opening in the Data and Theory team in the new Simons Collaboration in Ecological Neuroscience! www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/04/24/s... #neuroskyence

The shitty first draft is and always will be the number one strategy for writing well. Editing is a craft you can hone. Writing from scratch is a different dumpster fire every time you put a pen to a blank page.

Dear universities, I am begging you to stop requiring letters of recommendation for master's programmes. You and I both know you don't read them, so stop asking for them. Instead, have applicants list a name and get in touch if it's a borderline case. Signed, Everyone.

New preprint for #neuromorphic and #SpikingNeuralNetwork folk (with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social). arxiv.org/abs/2507.16043 Surrogate gradients are popular for training SNNs, but some worry whether they really learn complex temporal spike codes. TLDR: we tested this, and yes they can! 🧵👇 🤖🧠🧪

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Eve Marder: "The process of turning a word model into a formal mathematical model invariably forces the experimentalist to confront his or her hidden assumptions." The point isn’t to capture all the richness, it’s to put your money where your mouth is.

(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖 @ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981

The recent work I presented at Cosyne this year is now out on bioRxiv! Combining bio-plausible credit assignment using (apical) dendrites, realistic E/I cell types, and BTSP-based synaptic plasticity. One small step closer to understanding learning in the brain! Check out the summary here 👇

Our paper is out in Nature. By examining various inputs to the motor cortex during learning, we found that thalamic inputs learn to activate the cortical neurons encoding the movement being learned. Tour de force by Assaf in collab with Felix and Marcus. Congrats! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is an amazing set of experiments, we're clearly living in the golden age of connectomics and structure/function mapping. Congrats to the whole team!

“My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it.” www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightl...

Take our short 5-min anonymous survey on the Neuromorphic field’s current state & future: 📋 tinyurl.com/3jkszrnr 🗓️ Open until May 12, 2025 Results will be shared openly and submitted for publication. Your input will help us understand how interdisciplinary trends are shaping the field.

And just today the EIC of Nature Neuroscience told me in public that they are a for-profit company and if they had to pay reviewers they would "need" to raise prices.

I am teaching my phd writing workshop course this quarter, question: are there any words/phrases said to you by an advisor/mentor that stuck with you, were memorable, or particularly helpful? If so please reply below!

💯 eLife seems to be the only journal that is making a serious attempt at reforming the outdated scientific publishing system. They are not perfect and people love to criticize them, but I haven't seen anyone else stick their neck out to try something new

3/5) The real mechanism for credibility in science is simply the test of time: Can someone reproduce the results? Do others build on the findings? Real rigour in science comes from waiting to see whether a result holds and leads to new results. Period - that's it. It's not peer review.

I've written a blog post about my visualization of federal funding in AI research. mark-riedl.medium.com/visualizing-...

Our new paper is out in Science. What is the synaptic plasticity rule in the brain, we asked. It turns out there are multiple, even within individual neurons. Congrats Jake! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...