Mark Iskarous

Thank you to my workshop co-organizers @johndowney.bsky.social and Nitish Thakor! Thank you to IEEE and @embs.org!

You can find information about the conference (neuro.embs.org/2025/) and can register for the workshop and conference (web.cvent.com/event/fe673d...). Early-bird registration ends 9/23!

You can learn more about the workshop at drive.google.com/file/d/1brwc...

• Prof. Daniel Yoshor, M.D. Yoshor, University of Pennsylvania, "The Next Generation of Viusal Cortical Prosthetics"

• Prof. @chethanp.bsky.social, Emory University & Georgia Tech, "Complex neural population dynamics underlying multifunctional BCIs"

• Prof. Robert Gaunt Gaunt, University of Pittsburgh, "Bidirectional BCIs - Improving function by restoring sensation"

• Prof. @kevin-otto.bsky.social, Purdue University, "Historical and future implanted interfaces for BCI"

• Prof. Frank Willett, Stanford University, "Intracortical Speech BCIs - Challenges and Opportunities

This half-day workshop brings together leading researchers to examine the current state of implanted BCI technology, explore its translational potential, and critically assess the scientific and engineering challenges that will shape the field’s future. We have an amazing speaker and panel lineup.

I'm very excited to share the workshop "𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐁𝐂𝐈𝐬: 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬" which will be on November 11 at the IEEE/EMBS International Conference on Neural Engineering in San Diego!

#IEEE #NER25 #neurotech #BCI #iBCI

ATTN: #Postdocs - Your opportunity to lead the future of #science starts now! Applications for the 2025 #HannaGrayFellows Program are OPEN. 📢

Take your first step toward joining a community of changemakers in science. Applications are due 2.26.25, @ 3:00 p.m. ET. 💫

Apply today! hhmi.news/48n2lfh 👈

The coarse mental map of the breast is anchored on the nipple Touch plays a key role in our perception of our body and shapes our interactions with the world, from the objects we manipulate to the people we touch. While the tactile sensibility of the hand has be...

"The tactile acuity of the breast was even lower than that of the back... touches to different regions of the nipple were largely indistinguishable" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Meta has an AI for brain typing, but it’s stuck in the lab The social network company hopes neuroscience will give it an advantage in the AI race.

#Meta has an #AI for brain typing, but it's stuck in the lab www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/07/1... by @antonioregalado.bsky.social; "The social network company hopes #neuroscience will give it an advantage in the AI race"

Just finished a two week sprint to submit an NIH F32 Fellowship application! It was quite intense, but glad it's done 😊 and I actually feel good about the proposal. Hopefully things will he back to normal at the NIH by the time it gets reviewed

It was a real privilege to interview Daniel Dennett about his five favourite books for @five_books fivebooks.com/best-books/d...

Just out in J Neuromorph Comput & Eng: Loss shaping enhances exact gradient learning with Eventprop in Spiking Neural Networks doi.org/10.1088/2634.... With @neworderofjamie.bsky.social.
We report how Eventprop scales to harder learning tasks.
TL;DR: It works great but not without extra effort. 🧪🧵

Dendrites endow artificial neural networks with accurate, robust and parameter-efficient learning - Nature Communications Artificial neural networks, central to deep learning, are powerful but energy-consuming and prone to overfitting. The authors propose a network design inspired by biological dendrites, which offe...

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

I've never been directly funded by NIH, but in honor of this amazing organization with great people, here is my talk from last fall when they hosted me. One of the best visits I have had anywhere.

oir.nih.gov/wals/2024-20...

📢PSA: #NeurIPS2024 recordings are now publicly available!

The workshops always have tons of interesting things on at once, so the FOMO is real😵‍💫 Luckily it's all recorded, so I've been catching up on what I missed.

Thread below with some personal highlights🧵

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...

Neuromorphic computing at scale Nature - Approaches for the development of future at-scale neuromorphic systems based on principles of biointelligence are described, along with potential applications of scalable neuromorphic...

I'm very excited that this review on scalable neuromorphic hardware, headed up by Dhireesha Kudithipudi, has finally come out in Nature🧪🧠🤖

rdcu.be/d7atq

Neuromorphic hardware is ready for prime time. There are things to keep advancing, but I think the bigger opportunities lie in how we use it!

Geometry and dynamics of representations in a precisely balanced memory network related to olfactory cortex Computational modeling revealed that balanced assemblies of excitatory and inhibitory neurons shape representational manifolds in olfactory cortex-like recurrent networks, resulting in joint maps of s...

Now published in @elife.bsky.social doi.org/10.7554/eLif... a fun collaboration with
@clairemb90.bsky.social and Rainer Friedrich

Congrats again to John Hopfield & Geoff Hinton on the well deserved #NobelPrize in Physics. A couple of weeks ago I gave a colloquium on "The physical origins of artificial intelligence" at the Stanford Linear Accelerator explaining the prize. Video: colloquium.slac.stanford.edu/events/2024-...

Advancing Neuromotor Interfaces by Open Sourcing Surface Electromyography (sEMG) Datasets for Pose Estimation and Surface Typing We’re releasing emg2qwerty and emg2pose—two large datasets and benchmarks for sEMG-based typing and pose estimation, as part of the NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks track.

New 716 hour EMG dataset just dropped ✨ ai.meta.com/blog/open-so...

#compneuro #neuroAI #neuromorphic #neurorobotics #tactile

Now, you can see the real-time human-operated texture classification system in action!

This work was largely inspired by the neuroscience findings of Sliman Bensmaia's group particularly from Hannes Saal. Thank you to Nitish Thakor, the Neuroengineering and Biomedical Instrumentation Lab, and JHU BME.

Please check out the paper to learn more!

Furthermore, because the neuromorphic representations are based on biological processing, this work can be used in the future as the basis for naturalistic sensory feedback for upper limb amputees.

These results demonstrate that invariant neuromorphic representations enable better performing neurorobotic tactile sensing systems.

The speed invariance algorithm was adapted to a real-time human-operated texture classification system and showed similar improvements. The invariant representation is even more crucial in this context due to human imprecision.

We tested the system on a dataset collected in 15 speed-force conditions. Texture classifiers using the invariant representations have higher accuracy, improved computational efficiency, and increased capability to identify textures explored in novel speed-force conditions.