← Feed

Posts

• Post #4306032

  @gepasi sure, it's better that he's saying this than being gung ho on AI, but many people are saying this sort of thing, including many who are not personally profiting from exploitation of academic labour.

• Post #4306031

  @curvenote and @openrxiv @biorxivpreprint teaming up to make an incredibly cool new tool to read biorxiv preprints as HTML with nice features (particularly on desktop when you hover over links). Try it on any biorxiv preprint, for example my most recent one (with just a couple of bugs that I expect will get ironed out soon): https://reader.openrxivlabs.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.25.666748v2?utm_source=biorxiv&utm_content=rr To me little quality of life features like this can potential...

• Post #3895290

  The $700k/yr-paid editor of academic labour exploitation magazine Science writing an article complaining about how AI is exploiting academic labour and making publishers lives more difficult, and then getting caught using ChatGPT to write the article, feels like the perfect end to this academic year.

• Post #3892159

  Everyone is praising this article, but I find it a bit disingenuous. He criticises Taylorism ("scientific management") but that's exactly what researchers are subject to, and the glam publication economy is at the heart of it. Science magazine's business model, and the source of its editor's $700k salary, rely on this exploitation of academic labour. There wouldn't be an AI slop paper problem if it weren't for journals and ranking researchers by publication metrics...

• Post #2901584

  You might have read that arxiv is banning people for a year if they post LLM-generated papers and cheered it on. But most of the discussion about this doesn't correctly explain the policy and it is not a good thing. First up, the policy is that "incontrovertible evidence" of using LLMs and not checking the output is what's at stake. An example given is a hallucinated reference. Second, the ban will apply to all coauthors of the paper, not just the person sub...

• Post #2901583

  Right, time for a social media break. Not sure how long. See you on the other side (or maybe not, who knows). Might drop back to post new papers.

• Post #2434800

  #photography

• Post #2434798

  I think there's some genuinely interesting conversations to be had about machine learning and mathematics. My problem is that every time I see an article on this topic now, it always has such strong branding - for example Tim Gowers' recent article has the product name and version in the title itself - and I can't help but feel like I'm the victim of an intricate (likely not direct) marketing scheme. That makes it hard for me to want to engage in that discussion b...

• Post #2434797

  RE: https://neuromatch.social/@neuralreckoning/116544442931673780 In general, academics talking about specifically named LLM products (rather than talking about LLMs in general) is now such a recognisable genre that it's hard to imagine that it's not somehow coordinated and planned as a marketing campaign. Would be fascinating to try to trace how this has happened.

• Post #2296578

  PhD opportunity in "The role of neural development in multimodal intelligence" with me, @marcusghosh and Flor Iacaruso. Read details below 👇. Note there's a very short window for applying (deadline Feb 27). UK candidates will be given preference unfortunately because of the source of funding, but it is open to all. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/school-of-convergence-science/phd-opportunities/ #neuroscience #ComputationalNeuroscience

• Post #1957829

  #photography

• Post #1957828

  #photography #SilentSunday

• Post #1957827

  #photography

• Post #1935079

  Idea for a different way of doing project grants. Make decisions about which projects to fund based only on the questions asked, and then require successful grantees to go through a multi round post decision review process to sharpen up the methods and make sure they can answer the question. One of the main reasons I find grant proposals and reviews unsatisfactory is the incentives are there for applicants to hide methodological issues which limits the collaborative value of the review. In this...

• Post #1900782

  Suppose you were a funder wanting to design a system to fund science projects that were bottom up rather than top down. How would you do it? I think you'd want to restrict it to non-faculty to start with, and have some sort of consensus-building rather than competitive approach. Like, maybe you could have an initial round where people proposed ideas, followed by a second round where people indicated who they'd be willing to work with and which aspects of their ideas they&#39...

• Post #1739500

  #SilentSunday #photography

• Post #1739499

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@thetransmitter/116476879384094089 The issues raised in this article bring to mind de Tocqueville's 1835 "Democracy in America" where he argues the reason for the success of American "democratic" science over European "aristocratic" science is that it makes things simple enough for anyone to reuse. We lose that using AI for science. There may even be a similar social dynamic. Those with the wealth and pow...

• Post #1739498

  #photography

• Post #1684558

  #SIlentSunday #photography

• Post #1684557

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@thetransmitter/116437242841012465 Great article and I completely agree. If we want to study the interesting thing about the brain ("intelligence") we need to study it doing hard tasks, not easy ones that can be solved with a single neuron or even none. Yes it makes the analysis harder but that's the challenge.

• Post #1684556

  RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@gconstantinides/116448779816230899 We're hiring for a project on #SpikingNeuralNetworks and #neuromorphic computing, to start in October this year, for 36 months. Can hire at pre- or post-PhD level. Feel free to email me informally, or apply at the link below. Please do share with your networks if you know someone who would be interested. #ComputationalNeuroscience

• Post #1442127

  The problem with the Nobel prize is not just that they've again awarded not a single woman, although they should certainly be ashamed of themselves. The problem is our deference to these fossilised patriarchal elitist institutions, reflecting broader issues in scientific culture. It's been depressing this week too see all the excitement and respect given to this prize. It shouldn't be a surprise to us that the bequest of a wealthy weapons manufacturer, managed by a monar...

• Post #1409893

  If you're at #CCN2023 and interested in multimodal processing, come and chat with us at our poster P-3B.68 with @marcusghosh from 1-3pm today in the Marquee. https://2023.ccneuro.org/view_paper.php?PaperNum=1062 If you're not at CCN, check our thread/preprint and we'd be happy to discuss! https://neuromatch.social/@neuralreckoning/110785811144218374

• Post #1409889

  Many thanks to all who sent abstracts for the SNUFA SNN workshop. We will be sending every participant a random sample of abstracts to vote on to help decide what should be a talk/poster. If you want to take part, register today (free). https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/snufa-2023-tickets-675972952297 More info on the workshop at: https://snufa.net/2023/ #SpikingNeuralNetworks #compneuro #snn #neuroscience

• Post #1409888

  I'm happy to announce the start of a new free and open online course on neuroscience for people with a machine learning or similar background, co-developed by @marcusghosh. YouTube videos and Jupyter-based exercises will be released weekly. There is a Discord for discussions. For more details about the structure of the course, and to watch the first video "Why neuroscience?" go straight to the course website: https://neuro4ml.github.io Currently available are videos...

• Post #1409887

  Here's me talking about multimodal processing and spiking neural networks at the VVTNS seminar series - many thanks to the organisers for the invite! https://youtu.be/jnQpnyASJe8?si=aR9QTgDYzs8A2xqG

• Post #1409884

  We have a new paper with @marcusghosh @GabrielBena on why we have nonlinearity in multimodal circuits. My lab page has links to journal, preprint, code, talk on youtube, etc.: http://neural-reckoning.org/pub_multimodal.html TLDR: Why is it a question that we have nonlinearity in these circuits? Well, the classical multimodal task can be solved with a linear network, so maybe those nonlinear neurons aren't actually needed? We find that nonlinearity is very important when you consider a...

• Post #1409881

  Come and meet the Neural Reckoners at the Bernstein Conference next week, with posters from: ⭐️ @GabrielBena on specialization/modularity ⭐️ @marcusghosh and Swathi Anil on multisensory processing ⭐️ Yang Chu on bootstrapping auditory learning with an innate circuit ⭐️Greta Horvathova on adversarial autoencoders #neuroscience

• Post #1409880

  New preprint! With Swathi Anil and @marcusghosh. If you want to get the most out of a multisensory signal, you should take it's temporal structure into account. But which neural architectures do this best? 🧵👇 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.19.629348v1 #neuroscience #computationalneuroscience #compneuro

• Post #1409879

  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 @GabrielBena finally published after the first preprint in 2021! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55188-9 We know the brain is physically structured into distinct areas ("modules"?). We also know that some of these have specialised function. But is there a necessary connection between these two statement...