Josh McDermott

If you are attending the Kempner symposium I encourage you to check out @gelbanna.bsky.social 's poster on models and benchmarks of continuous speech perception. He has many interesting results.

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

Discriminating image representations with principal distortions Image representations (artificial or biological) are often compared in terms of their global geometric structure; however, representations with similar global structure can have strikingly...

We are presenting our work “Discriminating image representations with principal distortions” at #ICLR2025 today (4/24) at 3pm! If you are interested in comparing model representations with other models or human perception, stop by poster #63. Highlights in 🧵
openreview.net/forum?id=ugX...

Opinion | Science Suffers With Trump’s Funding Freeze America’s scientific enterprise demands reliable stewardship, not destabilizing political intervention.

My father-in-law, Jack Strominger, and I wrote a letter to the @wsj.com editor about the current threats to science due to Trump's funding freeze. Please repost! www.wsj.com/opinion/scie...

Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale Image display by cell-by-cell retina stimulation, enabling colors impossible to see under natural viewing.

Impressive work to stimulate only the M-cones of the retina and make green appear greener than ever.

Coming (not too) soon to a theater near you!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Technical Associate I, Kanwisher Lab MIT - Technical Associate I, Kanwisher Lab - Cambridge MA 02139

I’m hiring a full-time lab tech for two years starting May/June. Strong coding skills required, ML a plus. Our research on the human brain uses fMRI, ANNs, intracranial recording, and behavior. A great stepping stone to grad school. Apply here:
careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...
......

Now accepting applications for the summer 2025 cohort: STEMM opportunities for college students with Hearing loss to Engage in Auditory Research (STEMM-HEAR)

www.stemm-hear.bme.jhu.edu

Applications are open for the 2025 Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! A two-day workshop 7/10-7/11 in NYC for PhD students and postdocs. All travel paid. Apply by April 14th.🧠🗽🧑‍🔬http://jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org/
@flatironinstitute.org @simonsfoundation.org

We are experiencing an assault on science unparalleled by anything I’ve seen in my life. It’s not one issue or another anymore, the entire institution is under attack by the most powerful individuals in the country.

This Friday, where will you be?

standupforscience2025.org

To protest Trump administration’s plans to cut NIH funding, researchers will march in Boston and elsewhere - The Boston Globe Inspired by the 2017 March for Science that drew millions, organizers are planning rallies in Washington D.C., Boston and other state capitals.

Hope to see you there!
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/20/m...

If you are here at the last day of ARO, don’t miss Sagarika Alavilli’s talk on “Measuring and Modeling Multi-Source Environmental Sound Recognition”, happening at 9:45 in Ocean Ballroom 9 - 12.

Two posters from our lab on deep auditory models, presented today at ARO:

T107 - “Modeling Normal and Impaired Hearing With Deep Neural Networks Optimized for Ecological Tasks” by Mark Saddler et al.

T138 - “Modeling Continuous Speech Perception Using Artificial Neural Networks” by Gasser Elbanna

Two more posters from our lab are being presented today at ARO:

M133 - “Neural Network Models of Hearing Clarify Factors Limiting Cochlear Implant Outcomes” by Annesya Banerjee et al.

M166 - “Preferences for Loudness and Pitch Vary Across Cultures” by Malinda McPherson et al.

And a talk by Ian Griffith at 4:15pm: “Human-Like Feature Attention Emerges in Task-Optimized Models of the Cocktail Party Problem”

SU191 - “Deep Neural Network Models of Human Sound Localization Indicate Which Aspects of Localization Are Mediated by Explicit Binaural Processing” by Mathias Dietz et al.

SU185 - “Cross-Culturally Shared Sensitivity to Harmonic Structure Underlies Aspects of Pitch Discrimination” by Malinda McPherson et al.

If you are at ARO today, lots of stuff to see from our lab.

Posters:
SU181 - “Optimization Under Ecological Realism Reproduces Signatures of Human Speech Recognition” by Annika Magaro et al.

SU184 - “Texture Streaming in Auditory Scenes” by Jarrod Hicks

If at ARO today, check out Lakshmi Govindarajan's poster on "Confidence in Sound Localization Reflects Calibrated Uncertainty Estimation". Number S147 if you are at the meeting.

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠

sciencehomecoming.com

Please to announce the successful thesis defense of Dr. Jarrod Hicks! His thesis provides the first thorough exploration of auditory scene analysis with environmental sounds. I’m excited to see what he does next.

Indirect Costs at NIH . . . I wasn’t planning on spending part of a Saturday writing about cost accounting principles and the like, but NIH-world was hit with a doozy of a policy announcement on Friday night:

New essay on NIH and indirect costs:
goodscience.substack.com/p/indirect-c...

NIH In Your State - United For Medical Research Select a state on the map to see the impact of NIH funding across America.

If you live in AK, AL, IN, FL, KS, KY, LA, ME, MO, OH, and SC, your reps are on the Senate HELP Committee which has jurisdiction over NIH.
Write to them pointing out the jobs and money coming to your state from NIH: www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...
describe impact of NIH cuts on....

I'm pleased to announce the successful thesis defense of Dr. Vin Agarwal! His thesis compiles an impressive body of work on auditory intuitive physics. Stay tuned for some great papers. It has been a pleasure working with him.

Dynamics of specialization in neural modules under resource constraints - Nature Communications The extent to which structural modularity in neural networks ensures functional specialization remains unclear. Here the authors show that specialization can emerge in neural modules placed under reso...

What's the right way to think about modularity in the brain? This devilish 😈 question is a big part of my research now, and it started with this paper with @solarpunkgabs.bsky.social, finally published after the first preprint in 2021! 🤖🧠🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

Bluetorial-A dream and a bit of a nightmare

Serving as Editor-in-Chief at Science was fascinating. I greatly enjoyed working with talented and committed editorial, news, graphics, and production staff. But the inside look into scientific publishing and AAAS was also deeply disillusioning.

Dynamical constraints on neural population activity - Nature Neuroscience Oby, Degenhart, Grigsby and colleagues used a brain–computer interface to challenge monkeys to override their natural time courses of neural activity. They found the time courses to be highly robust, ...

Very cool paper by Emily Oby and colleagues:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Interesting insights into the flexibility (or lack thereof) of neural dynamics for motor control

Do you want to study cognitive science and live in Paris?

Our master’s program in Cognitive Science at @ENS_ULM, @psl_univ, and @EHESS_fr is now accepting applications for 2025-2026. All courses are in English.

Deadline: 13 March 2025

More info: master-cognitive-science.ens.psl.eu/en

Wow, just wow.
V different approach reveals numerous problems in Scientific Reports - cf deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/10/an-o...
I do hope @springernature.bsky.social will start to publish reviewer reports and editor info as we suggested

Pre-print 🧠🧪
Is mechanism modeling dead in the AI era?

ML models trained to predict neural activity fail to generalize to unseen opto perturbations. But mechanism modeling can solve that.

We say "perturbation testing" is the right way to evaluate mechanisms in data-constrained models

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