Just spent two wonderful weeks in London for the Analytical Connectionism Summer School (hosted at Gatsby/UCL this year). Met lots of wonderful scientists at the intersection of cog neuro and machine learning. Learned a lot and can’t recommend more highly! Small meetings rule

I wanted to provide more color on this because its a bigger deal than the main Ai2 account is hyping it as. For example, the entire annual budget of the NSF for AI in 2026 is $655M dollars. To commit to a training models on single line item of about 20% of that is a huge deal.

Social scientists should not use chat interfaces when using LLMs in their research: they are impressively inefficient, and obscure/impose important methodological decisions that require thought. THREAD🧵

Wrote a new, modern stats curriculum. Teach about probability and sampling via computational examples / simulations with real data. It's unbelievably helpful for intuition. Everything else follows. Online and open-source: jrudoler-teaching.github.io/understandin...

Check out my (open source) short course on introductory statistics and data science! It covers fundamentals of programming and probability, and then uses those to build up an intuition for hypothesis testing through sampling and simulation jrudoler-teaching.github.io/understandin...

What's something you wish you learned in your first stats/data science course that would have helped you down the line? Like some key intuition or insight that crops up all the time in diverse problems? Something better than learning the formula for a t-test #MLSky #StatsSky

Have you played with our Confirmation Bias Unit, yet? Head out to buff.ly/sa8UIeY and give it a try, share with your colleagues and students, and give us your feedback.

There are two kinds of statisticians: those who like telling other people they're wrong, and those who don't talk at all

Today, we are publishing the first-ever International AI Safety Report, backed by 30 countries and the OECD, UN, and EU. It summarises the state of the science on AI capabilities and risks, and how to mitigate those risks. 🧵 Full Report: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/679a0c... 1/21

Announcing a new week-long program for young computational neuroscience/ behavior professors to talk about rigorous science, mentoring, lab management, and networking in a stunning retreat setting. Do great science as a community and have fun doing so.

newly converted @weightsbiases.bsky.social fan here! honestly did not realize how much better it could be than tensorboard. just way more organized, pretty, intuitive, and feature-rich. shoutout once again to the awesome engineers building various MLOps tools for the rest of us to use <3

I don't understand the product appeal of AI companions... and honestly the companies producing them sometimes feel predatory (though I believe some people have good intentions to reduce loneliness etc.) When I open friend.com the bot immediately turns on the anxiety / depression / alcoholism

Not a new topic but what are effective ways to incentivize grad students to be better TAs? I really enjoy teaching but it seems there’s zero incentive to do a good job (beyond personal fulfillment and an altruistic desire to help students). We’re evaluated solely on research!

If you’re in grad school, finding a therapist can be really helpful. The thing you’re doing is hard and it’s harder if you don’t have help managing imposter syndrome, stress, self esteem, and a whole bunch of other things.

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

My absolute favorite content on the internet is this guy Adam Aleksic (@etymologynerd, but not on Bluesky) who posts about linguistics. Awesome combo of silly content (“I made a gorilla language”) and super insightful commentary about language and communication interacting with modern tech/society

Visiting NYC really makes me feel like some sort of crunchy small town guy… but I live in Philly

LLM research today would look so different without @hf.co... making models of scale and diversity so easily accessible to researchers is an amazing engineering feat. Such a catalyst for progress. 🙏

I absolutely love Keynote for academic presentations Built-in support for Latex equations, easy UI, presenter view, super-customizable templates, looks beautiful, has great recording features Is it just the collaborative editing that has people using google slides or beamer/overleaf?

Shoutout to the guy on my flight playing 2048. Forgot it existed and am now immediately hooked again

Go follow @yuh42.bsky.social ! She’s brilliant and has great insight into the theoretical side of transformers, in-context learning, and diffusion models. Constantly amazed by her and many other students in our cohort + department

Love seeing all the recent progress on neuro foundation models!! Super important for the field to build more robust models that leverage data across subjects and tasks…. Needing to retrain subject and task-specific models from scratch just makes the research too expensive!

Are we really giving up on simplicity and elegance and adding hundreds of terms to our objective functions?? Because that would be a huge loss

I think it's funny that for the past week I haven't been able to stop listening to: 1) the Wicked movie soundtrack 2) the new Kendrick Lamar album Good luck to the AI trying to learn my music preferences...

Quick reintroduction for new followers - I'm a stats PhD interested in ML theory, applications of ML in neuroscience, and the fun intersection we call #NeuroAI A recent pub: we try to improve human learning by using EEG to predict when people are ready to learn www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Saquon Barkley SHEEESH!!! Go birds 🦅🦅🦅

Fun tutorial applying transformers to NFL player-tracking data!!

I feel like not enough people know about Quarto for creating documents. How it works: Write in markdown and use Quarto to convert it to html, pdf, epub, ... I produce my books with Quarto (web + ebook + print version). But you can also use it for websites, reports, dashboards, ... quarto.org

For no particular reason, I really like these starter packs: Google DeepMind: go.bsky.app/GZ4hZzu Theoretical CS: go.bsky.app/6A6GRSi ML Theory: go.bsky.app/21nFz12 Differential Privacy: go.bsky.app/A7ABG83

Reading a paper on sparsity that quotes Einstein: "The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." (1933) This ethos made me fall in love with physics

I feel like the beginning of each academic year comes with a lot of excitement, goal-setting and new projects Late fall is when it becomes obvious you were waaaayyy too optimistic about how much time you have

📝Admissions for our STATML are now open! ⏱️Deadline: 8th Jan '25 STATML is an @EPSRC funded CDT in Statistics & Machine Learning. Studentships are fully funded for a 4-year PhD/DPhil research programme. 🔗For more info, please visit: statml.io

My lab has been working on comparing neural representations for the past few years - methods like RSA, CKA, CCA, Procrustes distance We are often asked: What do these things tell us about the system's function? How do they relate to decoding? Our new paper has some answers arxiv.org/abs/2411.08197

Compute clusters usually have per-user storage quotas. When I want to check if I still have space I run a short bash command: touch grass.txt

The starter pack of all starter packs that don’t contain themselves

New best starter pack!!

🧠🤖 Do you have an ML background and want to learn a bit about #neuroscience? Check out our free online course! We think neuro and ML both aim to understand intelligence, and so it's good to know a bit of both to inspire new ideas that neither field might find on their own. neuro4ml.github.io

I made a starter pack for learning theory people to gather some people around the topic. There are too many names on here that I don't know so I only added a few I do. If you believe you should be on this list, let me know. I will add people with accurate profile descriptions. go.bsky.app/21nFz12

If you're teaching R, or statistics, and you want your students to get more practice of data wrangling with "messy" data, you can use the {messy} package to turn the clean data you currently use for examples into more realistic looking data! #RStats #StatsEd

I hold this opinion **very** strongly but have never been able to articulate it so well 🔥

Welcome!

Getting conferences on here is big! Huge utility in an academic social network giving high-signal updates about conference deadlines, job postings, etc.

Just heard a great talk by John Duchi at #deepmath on this paper: arxiv.org/abs/2206.12041 In constructing large datasets for machine learning it is common to establish ground truth labels (e.g. for ImageNet) by aggregating the responses of multiple labelers....

Lots of humility at #deepmath conference 🥲 #stats #MLSky #compneuro

Super important point and great article attached. I was an RSE for a couple years between my undergrad and PhD. It was a great learning experience (and tuition benefits were nice, got an MSE in data science for free). But experienced engineers need more agency, money, and opportunity for growth

All you need to remember is the cave! Draw a line between two points on the cave, and it lies under the curve of the cave. So averaging function values gives you something smaller than evaluating the function at the average.

Should conferences be free for students/trainees at the host institution by default? Often you can email the local organizers and get free admission (by volunteering etc.), but by and large I find I can’t attend conference sessions at Penn without paying (e.g. COLM).

Excited for the #deepmath conference this weekend @uofpenn.bsky.social !! If anyone will be on campus and wants to chat, send me a DM/email

Fun fact: If someone quotes a post of yours in a way that is unwelcome (as is commonplace on Twitter/X) there is a tool to combat the unwanted attention. Simply click the three dot menu on the quote post & click "Detach quote". This removes your post from their quote post. Useful to know, do share!

Talk: Speculations on Test-Time Scaling A tutorial on the technical aspects behind OpenAI's o1 and open research questions in this space. youtu.be/6PEJ96k1kiw Slides+bibliography: github.com/srush/awesom...