Rory Byrne
@rory.bio
Neuroscience PhD student, Cambridge UK. Confused but excited. "Everything around me was somebody's lifework" 👋 https://rory.bio 🔧 https://compmotifs.com/
Toy models, just in time for Christmas! Excited to share my first article for @thetransmitter.bsky.social #neuroskyence
The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 8mo agoAmid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
I built a link-sharing discussion website for (meta)science. talk.amacrin.com Scientific discourse here and elsewhere is a bit fragmented, so I made a space for centralised, casual discussion. You can log in with Bsky. Still in testing mode. I'll move it to a new domain once I find a good name.
Science Talk
A forum for discussing metascience, tools, and scientific ideas. Share essays, ask questions, and connect with researchers.
talk.amacrin.com
Answer: because seniors know the language of software architecture. This enriches their LLM prompting significantly. If you want to successfully use AI for coding, learn some software architecture!
Hacker News Top Stories@hackernewsbot.bsky.social · 11mo agoAI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly Make Seniors Stronger? | Discussion
Proud to have been a part of this, a great example of distributed async science! Huge thanks to @marcusghosh.bsky.social, @neuralreckoning.bsky.social, @tfiers.bsky.social, @krhab.bsky.social and others for putting in the bulk effort 🙌
Dan Goodman@neural-reckoning.org · 11mo agoIs anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪
A great piece from @ersatzben.bsky.social on the importance of bold, aesthetic, mission-oriented directions in publicly funded research. betterscienceproject.substack.com/p/the-counte...
The Counter-Reformation of science: how to make magnificence democratic
British research has perfected discipline and outsourced magnificence. The fix is to practise demonstration statecraft – visible proofs of capacity that pair theatre with delivery.
betterscienceproject.substack.com
How can we best use AI in science? Myself and 9 other research fellows from @imperial-ix.bsky.social use AI methods in domains from plant biology (🌱) to neuroscience (🧠) and particle physics (🎇). Together we suggest 10 simple rules @plos.org 🧵 doi.org/10.1371/jour...
New preprint for #neuromorphic and #SpikingNeuralNetwork folk (with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social). arxiv.org/abs/2507.16043 Surrogate gradients are popular for training SNNs, but some worry whether they really learn complex temporal spike codes. TLDR: we tested this, and yes they can! 🧵👇 🤖🧠🧪
Beyond Rate Coding: Surrogate Gradients Enable Spike Timing Learning in Spiking Neural Networks
We investigate the extent to which Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) trained with Surrogate Gradient Descent (Surrogate GD), with and without delay learning, can learn from precise spike timing beyond fi...
arxiv.org
🟢 Applications are now open for two SSI Fellows' events: Niko Sirmpilatze's "Animals in Motion" and Alessandro Felder's "Big Imaging Data". These events will take place during the NIU Open Software Week running between Monday 11 and Friday 15 August in London. www.software.ac.uk/news/ssi-fel...
How do babies and blind people learn to localise sound without labelled data? We propose that innate mechanisms can provide coarse-grained error signals to boostrap learning. New preprint from @yang-chu.bsky.social. 🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2001.10605
Learning spatial hearing via innate mechanisms
The acoustic cues used by humans and other animals to localise sounds are subtle, and change during and after development. This means that we need to constantly relearn or recalibrate the auditory spa...
arxiv.org
Come build tools for science with us in London! Food, cool people, great speakers (on both the science and toolmaking sides). #neuroskyence #openscience #desci #openchem #bioinformatics #opensource #foss
Wojtek Treyde@wtreyde.bsky.social · last yr.Following our successful SF event, we (www.compmotifs.com) are running another hackathon! When? 7-8 June. Where? London, UK. Who? Builders and researchers from academia and industry. What? Develop innovative computational tools to advance the natural sciences. Join us: lu.ma/apsqlxlj?utm....
How can we explore the space of computational models in #neuroscience 🧠? Picture a mouse navigating an environment with light and dark areas. 🧵1/10
Pablo Samuel Castro@pcastr.bsky.social · last yr.Can LLMs be used to discover interpretable models of human and animal behavior?🤔 Turns out: yes! Thrilled to share our latest preprint where we used FunSearch to automatically discover symbolic cognitive models of behavior. 1/12
If you’re in SF, come build tools-for-science with us later this month! 🛠️ #opensource #neuroskyence #openscience #machinelearning #compchem #chemsky
Wojtek Treyde@wtreyde.bsky.social · last yr.We (www.compmotifs.com) are coming to SF! Together with Pebblebed, we’re hosting a 2-day hackathon on 26-27 March for builders and scientists across disciplines to build new methods and tools for the computational and natural sciences. Join us: lu.ma/t5yik06g. Reposts will be much appreciated!
Scientific data and independence are at risk: We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political interference. By @neuralreckoning.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...
Science must step away from nationally managed infrastructure
Scientific data and independence are at risk. We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political…
thetransmitter.org
#opensource #python #openscience #neuroskyence #machinelearning #neuroai
Rory Byrne@rory.bio · last yr.🔧 Logis - turn your git history into a searchable scientific log. The `@commit` decorator auto-commits your code when your experiment runs - with metadata in the message. Then you can find previous results by querying for commits with (e.g.) metrics.accuracy > 0.9. github.com/flywhl/logis
🔧 Logis - turn your git history into a searchable scientific log. The `@commit` decorator auto-commits your code when your experiment runs - with metadata in the message. Then you can find previous results by querying for commits with (e.g.) metrics.accuracy > 0.9. github.com/flywhl/logis
GitHub - flywhl/logis: Turn your git commit history into a scientific log
Turn your git commit history into a scientific log - flywhl/logis
github.com
Who likes categories anyway? I wonder what this means for the concept of "areas"... #neuroscience www.thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...
Most neurons in mouse cortex defy functional categories
The majority of cells in the cerebral cortex are unspecialized, according to an unpublished analysis—and scientists need to take care in naming neurons, the researchers warn.
thetransmitter.org
🔧 Cyantic v0.3.0 - a little library I wrote that builds complex Python objects (like Tensors) from simple blueprints using @pydantic.dev. (The name comes from cyanotype photography, i.e. the "blueprint") #opensource #python #openscience github.com/flywhl/cyantic
GitHub - flywhl/cyantic: Build complex types from simple blueprints via Pydantic
Build complex types from simple blueprints via Pydantic - flywhl/cyantic
github.com
🔧 Re-sharing an old tool: a recursive function to generate hierarchical, modular, Dalean connectivity matrices in PyTorch. Modules are locally dense, with increasingly sparse connections to more distal modules. #neuroai #neuroskyence gist.github.com/rorybyrne/dd...
I see the talks from Montreal AI and Neuroscience (MAIN) 2024 are now online: www.youtube.com/@MAINConfere... #neuroai #neuroskyence
MAIN Conference
Montreal AI and Neuroscience (MAIN) is an international conference organized by the UNIQUE Centre in collaboration with the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM) at the University of Montreal since...
youtube.com
Forget LLMs, we need more good-old-fashioned code generation. Especially in science. I should be able to define models, analysis, wet-lab protocols, and figures in a declarative language (SQL is declarative), and use opinionated tools to generate the required code. github.com/sqlc-dev/sqlc
GitHub - sqlc-dev/sqlc: Generate type-safe code from SQL
Generate type-safe code from SQL. Contribute to sqlc-dev/sqlc development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Pleasantly surprised to see surrogate gradients used here to optimise over collision detection events (@ 18:28). Relevant for #NeuroAI since step functions can model lots of things in neurons beyond just spiking. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Al...
[Kevin Tracy Ph.D. Defense] Differentiable Convex Modeling for Robotic Motion Planning and Control
YouTube video by CMU Robotic Exploration Lab
youtube.com
Nice to see journals thinking about software tools, but I wonder if they can offer more to toolmakers than “here is a place to re-write your README in more opaque language”?
eLife@elife.bsky.social · 2y ago🛠️ November's most-read Tools and Resources paper presents a new method to identify dynamic causal interactions in complex systems: https://buff.ly/3Zldxpt Learn more about publishing your tools or resources with us: https://buff.ly/4f2O0Ht
If you work with Python dataframes (pandas, @pola.rs) and are not using skrub.TableReport, you're missing out 😀 We keep improving it
Skrub@skrub-data.bsky.social · 2y agoA new version of skrub is out! skrub 0.4.1 fixes some issues with the TableReport and the tabular_learner, fills some gaps in the documentation, and ensures compatibility with the latest scikit-learn version (1.6). Changelog: skrub-data.org/stable/CHANG...
Unconscious mind rules the roost. "According to the researchers, this theory is important because it explains that all our decisions and actions are actually made unconsciously, although we fool ourselves into believing that we consciously made them." www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2022/1...
New Explanation for Consciousness | Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine
bumc.bu.edu
We highlighted member Susan Goldin-Meadow's groundbreaking research on language origins. Her @uofchicago.bsky.social work reveals how deaf children create communication, transforming our understanding of human linguistic creativity. Read more: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
