After a fantastic week of discussions at COSYNE, I’m excited to now be in Amsterdam for the Winter School on Foundation Models. I am interesting in developing foundation models that can continuously learn, adapt, and reason. If you’re around, I would love to connect! 🇳🇱

Excited to present my poster at COSYNE 2026! We explore whether Successor Features (SFs) in reinforcement learning exhibit properties similar to hippocampal place cells, using analytical tools from neuroscience. Come say hi if you’re around!

A good introductory read for cognitive neuroscience

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy. Details found here👇 www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

Couldn't agree more. Rather than burying the experiments that did not work, we should embrace them and consider the results in their entirety.

How does our brain predict the future? Our review of predictive processing + research program is now on arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2504.09614 50+ neuroscientists distributed across the world worked together to create this unique community project.

Excited to my favourite conference will be back in Montreal this week! Looking forward to catching up with old friends as well as making new ones! If you are attending the main conference or the workshops and would love to chat, let me know! :)

Join us at this #COSYNE2025 workshop to discuss foundation models for neuroscience!!! #neuroscience #NeuroAI #MLSky 🧪

As always, I enjoy learning and hearing the wise words from Prof. Rich Sutton, the new Turing Award winner! As he put it, there are no authorities in Science and anyone can question anyone else. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_Pe...

Very well deserved! Congrats to Andy & Rich!

Who is a cognitive scientist? There's been fascinating discussion about cognition, but I'm as interested in who we think of as cognitive scientists. New essay includes a visual presentation of cog-sci's historical diversity--or lack thereof. buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/who-is-a-c...

Looking forward to this new NeuroAI symposium! 🧠

Thrilled to see this paper finally published! The manifold representations in Figure 1H were a key inspiration behind the visualization of Successor Features (SF) in our recent SF paper. It's fascinating how insights from neuroscience can help us interpret representations learned in deep RL.

Lately, foundation models like BrainGPT & Cognitive FMs are dominating AI & science. But is our future solely built on these models? What about alternative techniques? How do we keep our scientific ecosystem diverse? As a community, where do we see the future of NeuroAI?

This is FASCINATING! Thanks for sharing @kmpanthagani.bsky.social www.youcanknowthings.com/how-one-neur...

Key-value memory is an important concept in modern machine learning (e.g., transformers). Ila Fiete, Kazuki Irie, and I have written a paper showing how key-value memory provides a way of thinking about memory organization in the brain: arxiv.org/abs/2501.02950

Please, spread! 🧠 Competitive PhD funding is available for neuroscience projects in the Parisian region. Consider your options 👇 dim-cbrains.fr/en/phd-progr... @c-brains.bsky.social

Cutting it a bit fine, but here’s my review of the year in neuroscience for 2024 The eighth of these, would you believe? We’ve got dark neurons, tiny monkeys, the most complete brain wiring diagram ever constructed, and much more… Published on The Spike Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

Something to think about if you are pursuing Non-LLM fundamental research during your PhD.

Why does anyone have any issue with this? I've seen people suggesting it's problematic, that neuroscientists won't like it, and so on. But, I literally don't see why this is problematic...

I've been arguing that we will be able to train foundation models on neural data from different species, because I suspect that there are sufficiently preserved motifs in neural computation across the phylgenetic tree. This paper appears to support that idea! www.cell.com/cell/abstrac... 🧠📈 🧪

NEW: we have an exciting opportunity for a tenure-track professor at the #KempnerInstitute and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Read the full description & apply today: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/14362 #ML #AI

Happy to have contributed to the `Brain Prize` webminar Series on LLMs and the Human Brain: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyJx... Here is the full set of seminars: lundbeckfonden.com/brain-prize-... (And congrats again to Larry Abbott, Terry Sejnowski and Haim Sompolinsky!)

Hey Bluesky friends! I will be spending a few days in San Francisco before NeurIPS and would love to connect with others who share similar research interests! Whether it’s over coffee or a run, I’m happy to chat about NeuroAI, RL, or anything in between. Let me know if you’re around! 🙂

#Cosyne is now on Bluesky y'all! bsky.app/profile/cosy... #neuroscience #NeuroAI

Go work with Jonny!

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻? Maybe not neurons, perhaps RNA?? Great episode of Brain Inspired with Hessam Akhlaghpour. Do dynamical systems and/or RNNs implement universal computation? This discussion alone would be worth having. #neuroscience braininspired.co/podcast/199/

Here is a starter pack for relevant #neuro institutions on BlueSky. go.bsky.app/LMFsego Did we forget anyone?

I recently wrote a primer on UMAP for Nature Reviews Primers. If you are looking for an overview of the method, a getting started primer, or best practices it is a good place to start. rdcu.be/d0YZT

My talk at the BRAIN Initiative NeuroAI meeting is live! It starts at the 1h14m mark. Lots of great content across the board from, among others, @tonyzador.bsky.social , @bingbrunton.bsky.social and @tyrellturing.bsky.social videocast.nih.gov/watch=55160

1/ I work in #NeuroAI, a growing field of research, which many people have only the haziest conception of... As way of introduction to this research approach, I'll provide here a very short thread outlining the definition of the field I gave recently at our BRAIN NeuroAI workshop at the NIH. 🧠📈

Great thread from @michaelhendricks.bsky.social! Reminds me of something Larry Abbott once said to me at a summer school: Many physicists come into neuroscience assuming that the failure to find laws of the brain was just because biologists aren't clever enough. In fact, there are no laws. 🧠📈 🧪

TRANSMITTER How to be a multidisciplinary neuroscientist Neuroscience subfields are often siloed. Embracing an integrative approach during training can help change that. www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

I’m speechless. Truly an art and despite being only four minutes long, I learned a lot!

Announcing a new open access textbook for entry level behavioral neuro. Funded by NSF. Written by a collection of 26 neuro experts. Method demonstration videos and author interviews too. Consider using it in your courses to reduce financial barriers to education. openstax.org/details/book...

I'm making a list of AI for Science researchers on bluesky — let me know if I missed you / if you'd like to join! go.bsky.app/AcP9Lix

One of the most interesting debates in #neuroscience in recent years is whether phasic dopamine is about reward prediction errors (as in TD-learning) or movement initiation. This paper seems to provide pretty convincing evidence for the former (prediction errors): www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪

This paper from Claudia Clopath's lab is very exciting for me. I've been musing for a while now that the challenge of approximating gradient descent is probably made way easier in the brain by feedback signals for control. Here they show it!!! openreview.net/forum?id=xav... 🧠📈 #NeuroAI 🧪

OK folks, I've started an episodic memory starter pack. By no means a full list so reply below if you're an episodic memory nerd! go.bsky.app/2mtNK43

Man, this is hilarious! 😂

Did you know #RLDM2025 is coming to Dublin next June? rldm.org Abstract submission open now ☘️ 🇮🇪

As the history of the nascent discipline of NeuroAI reveals, neuroscience has inspired advances in artificial intelligence, and AI has provided a testing ground for models in neuroscience, accelerating progress in both fields. By Anthony Zador www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/neur...

Fun to see this place coming a bit more alive! I tried my hand at a starter pack for neural engineering & computationally-leaning (systems) neuroscience. Super not exhaustive, so if you want to be added (or removed), just ping me. I'm still working on finding folks here. go.bsky.app/Ty3ftme

🎉 Welcome to all affective scientists and emotion enthusiasts who’ve recently joined Bluesky! We’ve created a starter pack to help you connect with others in the field—take a look to discover great people to follow. Reach out if you'd like to be added to the list! #AffectSci go.bsky.app/JU6K9No

Crafting quality papers is an art that demands practice. Inspired by this great article on Michael J Black's insights, I would also like to highlight another invaluable resource shared by @tyrellturing.bsky.social during our Simple SFs paper collaboration. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Just put together the beginnings of a systems & behavior neuro starter pack (focus on rodent work) - obviously a lot of people missing, and most included are in my own little bubble, so if you want to be added do reply here! go.bsky.app/Hxpe53o

The first preprint of my postdoc with @dudman.bsky.social is now online! Here we wanted to understand the algorithms mice use when learning to forage in large environments with many potential resources. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I have met @paulmasset.bsky.social previously at Cosyne before he moved to McGill in Montreal recently. He has been working on some really cool work on connecting distributed RL and Dopamine theory and if this is your vibe, Paul is a great person to work with! 🥳

His answer (roughly): "When Terry and I invented the Boltzmann machine, we were sure it was how the brain works, and we would eventually win the Nobel for physiology. But, we were wrong. Luckily, it turns out that if your model of the brain is wrong you just win a Nobel for physics instead."