🌙 Lune Bellec

Working at Université de Montréal and need to access their resources using a VPN BUT you're on linux/ubuntu? this can be *really* challenging. Instructions are sparse, and the proposed software for security is filled with security holes because the proposed version is obsolete (the irony). After years of struggle, I've given up and decided to install a windows virtual machine on my computer, entirely dedicated to that use case. And here's the resulting tutorial: https://simexp.github.io/vpn-udem/

Sharing this picture with a mix of nostalgia and gratitude.

Back in 2015, Canada Foundation for Innovation/Fondation canadienne pour l'innovation funded a small but ambitious infrastructure shared by the labs of Simona Brambati and myself: 100 TB of rapid shared disk space on the Canadian high-performance computing grid, plus 2 PB of tape archive.
That seed allowed us to run large-scale studies combining many public datasets over the years, which had a huge impact on the lab's scientific trajectory. From there, it grew into Adami: a full data management platform led by Julie Boyle for the entire CRIUGM - Centre de Recherche de l'Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM) and supported by Institut TransMedTech de Montréal

My lab created a collective painting a few years ago, when the HBM Brainhack was held in Montreal..To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the infrastructure, I have installed the painting on the door of the "DataLab" room where we host the workstations directly connected to this high-speed data pool. A huge thank-you to the organizations and people who made this journey possible.

"A murder of butterflies" has a nice ring to it.

Join Us for the first @cneuromod@neuromatch.social workshop featuring the Algonauts brain encoding competition

Curious about creating models of how the brain processes video, sound, and language? Join us for our first CNeuroMod workshop where we’ll introduce a unique collection of brain data and rich stimuli (https://cneuromod.ca)—and show you how researchers can create AI models that encode brain activity from video data.

We’ll also dive into the Algonauts competition (https://algonautsproject.com/), where teams from around the world challenge each other to build the best AI models that mimic brain activity while participants are watching videos. This session is designed for a multidisciplinary audience —from psychologists to computer scientists—and will give you practical insights into the exciting intersection of brain science and artificial intelligence.

This special session is co-organized by the Unique Network (Union of Neuroscience and AI Québec) and will be held in a hybrid format (Zoom or in-person).

Date & Time: June 10th, 10 am - 12 pm
Location: Room M6809, CRIUGM, 4545 chemin Queen Mary, Montreal, H3W 1W4
Registration: Free, but mandatory, using https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cneuromod-workshop-tickets-1397224398789?aff=oddtdtcreator

new brain foundation model study, this time with a graph neural net architecture and fMRI, looking at a range of disorders and downstream tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02044v1 #neuroAI

#neuroAI preprint alert: studying the convergence of multimodal AI features with brain activity during movie watching. Notably identifies brain areas where multimodal features outperform unimodal stimuli representations. And it uses @cneuromod.ca 's movie10 dataset :) https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20027

Please note: my main professional email address is now lune.bellec@umontreal.ca — my previous address has been deactivated.

This may just be an email address, but it’s one that brings me a lot of joy.

Many thanks to @umontreal@bird.makeup for making the transition smooth (once I actually read the instructions properly 😅).

🔍 Can one hundred scans be linked to hearing loss? The case of the Courtois NeuroMod project

For over five years, the Courtois NeuroMod project scanned six participants weekly using fMRI — creating the largest individual-subject fMRI dataset ever collected.

MRI machines are loud, and participants wore MRI-compatible Sensimetrics earphones with foam inserts and additional custom over-the-ear protection. We still remained vigilant about potential impacts on auditory health.

📣 A new study, led by Eddie Fortier under the supervision of Adrian Fuente, and now published in PLOS ONE, presents the results of an auditory monitoring protocol conducted in parallel with CNeuroMod:
🔗 https://lnkd.in/eRinvsDH
Key Findings:

Across participants, we found no clinical signs of ear trauma immediately following scanning. Changes in detection thresholds were typically <10 dB, even in high-frequency ranges (>10 kHz) where variability was greatest.

One participant with pre-existing unilateral hearing loss was tested across five sessions. Their results were inconsistent — and in some cases, paradoxically showed improved sensitivity post-scan — likely due to test-retest variability and fatigue effects in the upper frequency range.

In long-term follow-up (up to 16 months delay), we observed no sustained hearing loss. While high-frequency measures remained variable, no clinically significant, consistent declines were found across the group.

🎧 While pure tone audiometry is a cognitively demanding test — especially following extended scanning sessions — our findings are reassuring: with proper hearing protection, even repeated, long-duration fMRI protocols like CNeuroMod can be conducted safely. See the paper for full results and a complete discussion.

The five-year CNeuroMod data collection phase is now complete, and we are deeply grateful to the participants who committed their time to this study, and to the Courtois Foundation for their visionary support.

We are now preparing a series of public data releases and publications that will continue to explore the many facets of this unique longitudinal dataset.

Stay tuned.

Something I’m really looking forward to in 2025 is the rise of truly multimodal models—capable of jointly processing vision, language, audio, and actions. These systems are finally starting to approach the richness of data streams available to human 🧠s. A great example of this direction is outlined in this recent work: https://openreview.net/forum?id=K4FAFNRpko

in this new living preprint https://preprint.neurolibre.org/10.55458/neurolibre.00031/#case-study-mary-anning Evelyn McLean and colleagues go back in time to a golden age of "little science", when dilettantes and enthusiasts led major scientific discoveries. They also imagine how amateur scientists can shape the future of science.

As usual with NeuroLibre, all figures can be re-executed, and the code to run the patent analysis is ready for you to explore here https://preprint.neurolibre.org/10.55458/neurolibre.00031/figure-1

Reproducible science made possible by
@mystmarkdown@fosstodon.org