Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

ZAPBench ZAPBench evaluates how well different models can predict the activity of over 70,000 neurons in a novel larval zebrafish dataset.

Awesome to see a whole brain activity benchmark: zapbench-release.storage.googleapis.com/landing.html

📣 The NeuroAI Course, from the CAJAL Advanced Neuroscience Training Programme is accepting applications!

🗓️ 14 Jul - 1 Aug 2025
📍 @champalimaudf.bsky.social
⏳ Deadline: 7 Mar 2025
💡 Stipends are available

🔗 Apply: form.jotform.com/Cajal_traini...
🔗 More info: cajal-training.org/on-site/neur...

Is your summer 2025 looking boring and monotonous? Apply to the Neural Systems and Behavior course (www.mbl.edu/education/ad...) at MBL in Woods Hole for an 8-week experience that will change your (scientific) life. Deadline: Feb 1st, 2025.

The Kennedy lab is recruiting for multiple funded postdoctoral positions in theoretical and computational neuroscience, following our recent lab move to Scripps Research in sunny San Diego, California. Ongoing projects in the lab span topics in: - reservoir computing with heterogeneous cell types - reinforcement learning/control theory analysis of complex behavior - neuromechanical whole-organism modeling - imitation learning/forecasting of mouse social interactions - joint analysis/modeling of effects of internal states on neural + vocalization + behavior data With additional NIH and foundation funding for: - characterizing progression of behavioral phenotypes in Parkinson’s - modeling cellular/circuit mechanisms underlying internal state-dependent changes in neural population dynamics - characterizing neural correlates of social relationships across species Projects are flexible and can be tailored to applicants’ research and training goals, and there are abundant opportunities for new collaboration with local experimental groups. San Diego has a fantastic research community and very high quality of life. Our campus is located at the Pacific coast, at the northern edge of UCSD and not far from the Salk Institute. We offer competitive postdoctoral stipends that reflect coastal cost-of-living expectations and include a relocation bonus, with research professorship positions available for qualified applicants. More information about the lab at https://www.kennedylab.org. Please email Ann Kennedy akennedy@scripps.edu with inquiries.

Interested in diffusion models, behavior forecasting, internal states, neuromechanical modeling, reservoir computing, joint neural/behavioral datasets? Missing the sunshine?

We have multiple fully funded postdoc positions, come join us!

Merci Claire!!

Thanks, Oded! Great question! For laminar flow, you can estimate the fish's relative position and adjust the trajectory accordingly. For strong turbulent flow, you might mask the trajectory and run the pipeline using only the tail tracking data. Let me know if I can help with that!

A huge thank you to all my amazing co-authors: Pedro Silva, Alexandre Laborde, Miguel Mata, João Marques, Elena Collins, Randall Peterson, Christian Machens, and Michael Orger (@daniobrain.bsky.social), who made this possible! 🙌
9/n

I'd love for fellow zebrafish researchers to try out Megabouts. We've put up extensive documentation and tutorials at megabouts.ai 🛠️

Feedback is very welcome!
8/n

Behavioral phenotype under pharmacological treatment. Left: we see no difference in overall mobility. Right: we can expose the phenotype by breaking down locomotion into individual movements using Megabouts

Our method also improves sensitivity in detecting drug-induced phenotypes! 🔬
7/n

Sensorimotor mapping

Megabouts builds on the repertoire of zebrafish behavior uncovered by João C. Marques. This clustering of swim movements is fantastic for quantifying how stimuli translate into actions.
6/n

Swim bouts classification performance

What's really cool? Our model maintains high accuracy even at lower frame rates and without tail tracking! 📊
5/n

Megabouts Pipeline

Megabouts uses a Transformer neural network at its core, with each input token representing a pose measurement. This helps us overcome issues like changes in frame rate, and missing data, offering robust classification of movements across various setups.
4/n

There are fantastic tools for tracking zebrafish behavior: DeepLabCut (@deeplabcut.bsky.social), SLEAP (@talmo.bsky.social), BonZeb, ZebraZoom (@clairewyart.bsky.social), and Stytra.
But we lack methods to process these tracking data into standardized ethograms.
3/n

Quantifying behavior is crucial in neuroscience, genetics, and pharmacology. With our growing ability to track movements comes the need to standardize how we describe them—despite the diversity in recording configurations.
2/n

This is my first post here, and I'm happy to share some news. We've just launched megabouts.ai! 🐟📈
1/n