Joseph Monaco

🌍 SPARC Codeathon draws global talent to build tools for open science!

In 2024, teams won $50K for innovations like SPARC.RL & oSPARC-Hub.

📍See where participants came from + watch the winners: www.youtube.com/watc...

💰 $20K up for grabs in 2025: sparc.science/news-a...
#NIH_SPARC #DevLife

Why I'm more worried about AI safety now than 6 months ago Exponentials are all you need

New post: things have been moving very fast in AI. But has safety caught up to capabilities? open.substack.com/pub/naix/p/w...

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK | Quanta Magazine The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

The brain is a dense, thorny network of neurons, which come in many flavors and whose behaviors are controlled by a menagerie of molecules released on precise timescales. It is staggeringly more complex than an AI algorithm.

Open Tools | Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics We are doing science in the open. Our data and tools are openly available to the community.

All of our neural dynamics tools, software, protocols, datasets, and even hardware plans are now available in one convenient place!

Check it out and let us know what you'd like to see next: www.allenneuraldynamics.org/tools

🧠📈

Dean Buonomano explores the concept of time in neuroscience and physics He outlines why he thinks integrated information theory is unscientific and discusses how timing is a fundamental computation in brains.

In this episode of “Brain Inspired,” @braininspired.bsky.social talks with @deanbuono.bsky.social about why he thinks integrated information theory is unscientific and how timing is a fundamental computation in brains.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

Neuromorphic Questionnaire This form collects valuable information from the Neuromorphic Community as part of a project led by Matteo Saponati, Laura Kriener, Sebastian Billaudelle, Filippo Moro, and Melika Payvand. The goal is...

Take our short 5-min anonymous survey on the Neuromorphic field’s current state & future:

📋 tinyurl.com/3jkszrnr
🗓️ Open until May 12, 2025

Results will be shared openly and submitted for publication. Your input will help us understand how interdisciplinary trends are shaping the field.

I'm extremely proud of this work, which shows how using the physics of analog electronic circuits helps us understand learning and computational principles of cortical neural networks and build efficient neural processing systems that can complement and outperform AI accelerators in edge computing!

Aran Nayebi discusses a NeuroAI update to the Turing test And he highlights the need to match neural representations across machines and organisms to build better autonomous agents.

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, @anayebi.bsky.social joins Paul Middlebrooks to discuss his reverse-engineering approach to build autonomous artificial-intelligence agents.

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

ODIN Symposium 2025 I Speakers Preview the speakers and workshops below to gain further insight into conference programming.

Arrived for #ODIN2025 @alleninstitute.bsky.social we have organized a fantastic lineup of speakers & participants:
Topics cover High Throughput Acquisitions & Data Integration, Building/Benchmarking AI Models, Multiscale Analyses & AI Models.
CompNeuro North Star!
alleninstitute.org/odin-symposi...

Hot off the presses: big update to our work looking at how adaptive decoders influence neural representations.

We added heroic analyses to show in both experiments & models that the structure of what the brain learns is altered by adaptive decoders. Check it out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Yeah I got that. It seems like we’re between a rock (needing compute that scales with growing high-entropy neural-behavioral data) and a hard place (only having one proven path to achieve scale but that path blinds you along the way, unless you only care about prediction).

I meant in context of hw lottery and funding push for large-scale neural fdn models. Are we confident frontier transformers are “good enough” to embrace complexity of brain data in the way @tyrellturing.bsky.social wants? What if SOTA models are missing something critical for understanding brains?

Could either of you explain the value of benchmark-based “SOTA” architectures if current base models get 0% on ARC-AGI-2?

Do we care at all about generalizability viz. novel problem-solving, which human brains can do but Claude 3.7 just falls down? Language is not enough.

bsky.app/profile/fcho...

Eva Dyer and I wrote an opinion piece for @thetransmitter.bsky.social on why neuroscience needs to embrace complexity and accept the "bitter lesson" by using a data-driven regime at scale.

With commentary from several wonderful researchers!

🧠📈 #NeuroAI 🧪

I think I’ll dig in further and perhaps reach out via email. Very cool paper!

I agree the two peaks reflect distinct functions (esp. b/c no second beta dip in 3c) but concern is you are looking at theta power vs. peak accel when Kropff was theta freq vs. instant accel. Plus, I assume homing rotation was ballistic so peak accel indexes swing amplitude (and thus correction).

Science Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.

Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow:
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Theta activity supports landmark-based correction
of naturalistic human path integration

Impressive 128 channel mobileEEG study with hmdVR:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Beautiful support for oscillatory interference mechs of theta-phase reset. Curious though if that second peak in Fig 3b could be better explained as theta-power speed-tuning during stationary rotation, e.g., Supp. Fig 3a for rat head-scanning in my 2014 paper. dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.3...

Not to toot my own horn, but Neuromatch's NeuroAI course is one of the best places to learn about this exciting area of neuroscience. Students and postdocs, apply!

From interview of Lee Bollinger, 1st Amendment scholar who served as dean of @UMichLaw, president of @UMich, and president of Columbia University.
www.chronicle.com/article/were...

‘My career is over’: Columbia University scientists hit hard by Trump team’s cuts The US government has begun slashing US$400 million in research grants at Columbia University over pro-Palestinian campus protests.

🚨This week, many Columbia scientists lost grants that funded over half their annual income. Others will no longer be able to do research that helps treat thousands of sick patients across the US.

"It hurts," they told me.

My story for @nature.com 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🚨🧪 Are you a researcher affected by the recent cancellation of federal grants and contracts at Columbia University?

I'm working on a story for @Nature.com. If you want to chat, your identity will be kept private.

Signal: humbertobasilio.24
Email: humberto.basilio@us.nature.com

Repost please!

I’ve dismissed IIT as unscientific ever since first reading about it in Anil Seth’s 2006 paper. Can I have an h-index bump too?
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Congrats! I know that isn’t easy.

The animal doesn't carry around a loss function, that's a mathematical abstraction to help us organise our thoughts and nature is under no obligation to match that. I also agree it's a useful abstraction but it's not reality, just a model.

We need to start building international scholar owned and led infrastructure for science as soon as possible. Check out my article on this:

www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people:
18f.org

Bezos' changes at 'Washington Post' lead to mass subscription cancellations — again Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos's changes to the opinion pages have led subscribers to cancel in droves. It's the third wave of mass cancellations at the Post in just a few months.

The Washington Post has lost 75,000 subscribers since Wednesday, when Jeff Bezos reversed course and meddled in editorial operations, mandating what the opinion section can cover: www.npr.org/2025/02/28/n...

Inside the Collapse at NIH Administration officials pressured NIH to avoid clear advice from the agency’s own lawyers to restart grant funding now.

By @katherinejwu.com

"The NIH... supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,”

The NIH is in a struggle for its (and our) lives. This is existential to America: