Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience. #neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

New position paper! We argue that symbolic and neural network models are not in opposition to each other, but occupy different levels of analysis, and also outline a new research agenda for better understanding the relationship between them. Please check out the paper / thread for more details!

We’ll be at CCN next week with two posters, one contributed talk and one satellite talk! If you are interested in neural coding in primate hippocampus, modeling visual search, or cortical topography come and talk to us! See👇for details:

Went over the Centaur paper in lab meeting today. I got stuck on this plot, thinking initially the small difference between Llama and Centaur is bothering me. But the real issue hit me an hour later... Each layer's neural similarity is with the **whole** brain! No single layer is expected to sim 🧠

Grant reviewer on my proposal for using DNNs to model working memory: “The ability to yield new information is very limited because WM circuits have already been abundantly specified in clinical and preclinical studies.” So, it’s entirely solved now, eh? How long did I sleep last night?

Huge congratulations to @silicolabs.bsky.social on this achievement. Excited about this collaboration on visuomotor learning in VR. We also have some funding available for graduate students interested in doing research in this area. Reach out if you're interested. 🧠📈 🧠🤖 #VisionScience

Self supervised learning of spatial representations from episodic memories. Led by undergraduate student in my lab. Very proud!

Announcement: Workshop at #CCN2025 🧠 Modeling the Physical Brain: Spatial Organization & Biophysical Constraints 🗓️ Monday, Aug 11 | 🕦 11:30–18:00 CET | 📍 Room A2.07 🔗 Register: tinyurl.com/CCN-physical... #NeuroAI @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

If you are at #ICLR2025 and interested in topographic neural networks, come by @amirozhan.bsky.social 's poster. See the info below!

A point of pride for me was publishing a paper with a meme as a graphical abstract in a journal that dates back to 1878: physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... This is apparently a #TopViewedArticle, so the achievement got the recognition it deserves! 😅 CC @kordinglab.bsky.social

Don’t let Poilievre crush your CBC crush! From Paul Gross to Peter Mansbridge, Catherine O’Hara to the Levys—CBC has brought us icons we’ve loved for decades. Lose CBC, lose the crushes. #SaveTheCBC #CBCrushed #OurVoiceOurCBC #CdnPoli #PublicBroadcasting

Renowned neuroscientist Melanie Woodin has been named #UofT’s 17th president — and asks the community to join in her in “dreaming big.” #UofT alumna Woodin starts her five-year term July 1st. ➡️ uoft.me/uoftpres17

At #COSYNE2025? Come by Motahareh's poster at 1pm [2-089] if you like to know about how cool her NN model of visual search is! Trained de novo on visual search, its fast, efficient, mimics human behaviour, and has a beautiful neural geometry.

Check out our new paper on making deep networks topographical with a new variant of SOMs! Very proud of @amirozhan.bsky.social who did this work as an undergrad!

Recruiting phd/postdocs to mentor Undergrad Awardees!! This program brings UGs from across the 🌎 considering a career in neuro research Duties: meet students on 1st day, take them to a poster session, help them feel welcome. Apply: (very short!) form forms.gle/9hCniCA29ky5...

If you are a neuroscientist, please use SFN's site to write to your reps about the importance of funding for science (they have letters ready to go, you can just use theirs or write/edit as you see fit): www.sfn.org/advocacy/adv...

🌟 Sign up for the Neurogenesis Speaker Series! Join us on Feb 5 at @theneuro.bsky.social for talks featuring two HBHL-supported faculty, @paulmasset.bsky.social & @bashivan.bsky.social, as they share their groundbreaking research in brain health at @mcgill.ca. 🎙️ 🔗 Register today: mcgill.ca/x/wHe

Our new paper "Fooling LLM graders into giving better grades through neural activity guided adversarial prompting" lead expertly by Atsushi Yamamura shows how even in closed models like Gemini, we can add a small adversarial suffix to an essay to get unreasonably high scores arxiv.org/abs/2412.15275

Stonehenge Reports

If you’re at NeurIPS, Check out @xiaoxuanlei.bsky.social poster on representational geometry in RNN models of working memory!

Excited to release what we’ve been working on at Amaranth Foundation, our latest whitepaper, NeuroAI for AI safety! A detailed, ambitious roadmap for how neuroscience research can help build safer AI systems while accelerating both virtual neuroscience and neurotech. 1/N

Our new NeurIPS paper on naturalistic representations in dynamic WM models, led by @xiaoxuanlei.bsky.social and @bashivan.bsky.social Thread by Xiaoxuan 👇

My first post on BlueSky! Check out the work led by my graduate student @xiaoxuanlei.bsky.social on how RNN models encode and maintain high dimensional visual observations to solve memory-based tasks.

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."

I am recruiting graduate students for my lab @mcgillu.bsky.social for admission in Fall 2025! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.