Kristin Branson

When it comes to text prediction, where does one LM outperform another? If you've ever worked on LM evals, you know this question is a lot more complex than it seems. In our new #acl2025 paper, we developed a method to find fine-grained differences between LMs:

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🪰 A new ‘Eyemap’ developed by a team led by Arthur Zhao & @michaelreiser.bsky.social reveals how visual information detected by the fly’s eye shows up in neurons deep in the brain. Remarkably, the eye’s shape determines how flies see motion.👁️
🔗 hhmi.news/4kSZjou

TIL when upgrading your Ubuntu OS, sometimes it will just hang and not tell you what's going on. The solution is just to hold down the Enter key until it starts going again:
www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/curren...

Excited to be presenting my paper "Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different" tomorrow at ICML, 11 am - 1:30 pm, East Exhibition Hall A-B, E-500. I made a little video overview as part of the ICML process (viewable from Chrome): recorder-v3.slideslive.com#/share?share...

I recently participated in the High-Level Expert Panel on AGI, convened by the Council of Presidents of the UN General Assembly, which has just released its final report on the Governance of the Transition to AGI. Report below ⬇️
uncpga.world/agi-uncpga-r...

Tag on a rock that says "Mental as Anything" and has an icon of a brain

cute little label at the bottom of a climb that i thought applies to lots of things, including this "5.9"

Purple USB C port

Had fun slotting together my new Framework 13 laptop! Look how cute my purple USB port is!

I'd really like someone to get AI to solve package management for me. (I convinced myself to try to learn pixi this week and it has not solved all my problems.)

BirdCLEF25: Audio-based species identification focused on birds, amphibians, mammals, and insects in Colombia.
👉 www.kaggle.com/competitions...
@cvprconference.bsky.social @kaggle.com
#FGVC #CVPR #CVPR2025 #LifeCLEF
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I think the issue is with his sources of AI experts -- they are exclusively industry executives who are selling the product they are claiming is revolutionary. There's a lot of unknown about the future and even present capabilities of AI, according to this self-proclaimed expert.

Highly recommend the tutorial notebook by @briandepasquale.bsky.social for a good intro to GNNs and also working with Drosophila connectomics data!
tinyurl.com/cosyne-gnn-2...

It's amazing that, in the visual system, just examining neuron connectivity by eye has led to insights into what is being computed. This paper has all the resources needed for trying to understand these computations, and is exceptional in it's inventive ways for sharing this information

Flies are exceptionally good at fast and efficient visual motion processing. I'm fascinated by the heuristics/hacks evolution has come up with for processing motion in a moving animal. What can computer vision for robotics or on the edge learn from this?

Connectome-driven neural inventory of a complete visual system - Nature A connectome of the right optic lobe from a male fruitfly is presented together with an extensive collection of genetic drivers matched to a comprehensive neuron-type catalogue.

I know there's a 𝒍𝒐𝒕 going on right now, but I couldn’t be prouder to share this long-incubated labor of love: the complete connectome of the male 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 optic lobe 🧠🪰
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

gnnworkshop cosyne2025 It's All Connected!

Excited to participate in the Graph Neural Networks workshop at Cosyne on Monday March 31 (day 1):
IT’S ALL CONNECTED!
Graph approaches to geometric complexity in neuroscience
sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo...
Hope to see you there!

Closing the divide between analysis and publication: The notebook pub We're experimenting with treating our computational notebooks as publications themselves. This approach reduces publication burden, encourages faster publishing, and builds in reproducibility. Scienti...

Oh I'm very into open science approaches that deploy Jupyter Notebooks. I really like what @arcadiascience.com is doing with their new publication efforts & team - research.arcadiascience.com/pub/perspect...

A University President Responds to Those Who Have Suggested the School Should Dip Into the Endowment To the esteemed members of our faculty and staff, As president of this University, there is nothing more important to me than the health and safety...

This piece is evergreen: www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-u...

Please share broadly to your networks so this can reach its intended audience! And we are also looking for volunteers to help instruct/mentor. Details here: cv4ecology.caltech.edu/ai-upskillin...

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop speaker profile 3 is Ashok Litwin-Kumar, of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social! Ashok has been a driving force in connectomics-based modeling.

Excited to be presenting this work at #cosyne2025 this week - as a poster (session 3, no. 3-017) and as part of the “Reimagining RL in the Brain” workshop organised by Alison Comrie and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social. My first in-person cosyne, so looking forward to it!

Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel reopens after temporarily closing during holidays due to labour dispute The Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal has reopened after temporarily closing due to an ongoing labour dispute. Quebec’s largest hotel made the announcement on Dec. 12 and shut their doors day...

After hearing about the ongoing hotel workers strike at the #COSYNE2025 hotel, I cancelled my reservation and booked a room at a hotel a short 10 minute walk from the meeting. It was easy and I encourage others to do the same! #solidarity montreal.citynews.ca/2025/01/14/q...

Data-for-good rapid response team I'm collecting people with data science skills who may want to hear about sporadic opportunities to use their skills for good on short projects. Project themes will center on topics I am connected wit...

I'm organizing a "Data for Good Rapid Response Team", i.e. a set of people who can be mobilized to work on short data science projects to help various groups and organizations. Sign up here if this is of interest to you, and please share with others with data science skills.

Looking forward to learning all about the newest in graph neural nets at Cosyne next week!

I sat down with Jaida Elcock (@sofishtication.bsky.social), a marine biologist studying basking sharks, and Danny (@ecoevodanny.bsky.social), a coral researcher & HHMI (@hhmi.org) Gilliam Fellow, to talk all things ocean! 🦈🌿🌊

We explored their journeys, research, and more!

Want to procedurally generate large-scale relational reasoning experiments in natural language, to study human psychology 🧠 or eval LLMs 🤖?

We have a tool for you! Our latest #ICLR work on long-context/relational reasoning evaluation for LLMs ReCogLab!
github.com/google-deepm...

Thread ⬇️

Scientists have just cured pancreatic cancer in some patients with personalized mRNA vaccines. Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away.

They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.

I'm reading up on code generation evaluation, and I appreciate that the paper about APPS starts with the quote feom Steve Jobs, "Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think"
arxiv.org/pdf/2105.09938
Amen

PSA for people collaborating across countries: daylight savings time started in the US yesterday, but not everywhere else in the world

Why we organized ‘Stand Up For Science’ - Nature Human Behaviour In the USA, the Trump administration has signed executive orders that impose censorship on key areas of scientific research, strip government scientists of their jobs and reduce federal funding for sc...

Why did we organize Stand Up for Science? 🧪☀️⬇️

Read more in our Q&A in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social, out today!

Link - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@leslie-bern.bsky.social
@emmalovesscience.bsky.social
@cdelawalla.bsky.social
@jpflores.bsky.social
@samschuelstein.bsky.social

Calling all @cosynemeeting.bsky.social attendees!

@neurokim.bsky.social, Sam Lewallen and I are organizing a 🔥🔥 workshop on graph approaches to neuroscience, including graph neural networks!

For info see sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo...