I find agentic coding a powerful amplifier for teaching. This term, I taught with @simonprinceai.bsky.social 's excellent book, Understanding Deep Learning. The book's interactive figures are brilliant, but some students struggle to decipher surfaces presented top-down as 2D heat maps. 1/5

Happy to announce the 3rd iteration of NEAT (Neuro-AI-Talks), which will take place in Osnabrück September 14th-15th 2026. NEAT is a (deliberately small scale) NeuroAI workshop that brings together researchers from neuroscience and AI. www.kietzmannlab.org/neat2026/ More information below 👇

NEAT 2026

kietzmannlab.org

Israeli STEM postdocs abroad, have a look at this fellowship: www.gov.il/he/pages/rfp... 24 months x 13,500 NIS, Deadline: March 24, 2026 If you are working at the intersection of deep learning and cognitive (neuro)science, I'd be happy to host.

We are excited to announce that the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting (CCN 2026) will be held at New York University from August 3–6, 2026. 2026.ccneuro.org

Proud to share our lab’s first paper! Itamar’s work highlights an implicit but impactful tension between maximizing fit to behavioral data and staying sensitive to meaningful differences between neural network models.

Itamar Avitan@avitanit.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Excited to share my first paper: Model–Behavior Alignment under Flexible Evaluation: When the Best-Fitting Model Isn’t the Right One (NeurIPS 2025). link below.

Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...

We’re hiring in my dept. (IEM @ Ben-Gurion Univ.)! Tenure-track faculty opening in Robotics, Data/ML, Info Systems, Applied Stats, Production Systems, or Human Factors. www.bgu.ac.il/media/wwfbuc... Please repost 🙏

Shape-Based Measures Improve Scene Categorization by DNNs. Morteza Rezanejad's magnus opus finally out in IEEE PAMI. doi.org/10.1109/TPAM... A super productive and fun collaboration with John Wilder, Allan D. Jepson, Sven Dickinson, and Kaleem Siddiqi. Read on for a quick summary.