What important thing am I working on today? Trying to figure out a good way to parameterize fly head turning from our tracked data. Here's a plot I made while trying to visualize this. It's not really worth explaining what it is, I just thought it had some nice colors 😀
@kristinmbranson I really would like to know what's going on in the plot
@gaymanifold prepare to be bored by the minutiae of my work! These are the positions of lots of fruit flies' heads (triangle corners are the eyes and antennae of the fly) if I align them based on their thorax positions. I'm color coding by the angle the head is turned at. We track the eyes and antennae (and a bunch of other parts) of fruit flies using deep learning. I'm interested in understanding what algorithms flies use to explore their worlds, so we are trying to model their behavior, again using deep learning. Anyways, today I was specifically working on how to parameterize head movements, like could it just be a triangle of fixed size that rotates around a single point, so I was trying to visualize the range of head positions. Thanks for asking!
@kristinmbranson thanks for taking the time for your response. i love minutiae of people's work. i never knew that there were people trying to model how the head of a fly move. is it framed more in a biological way or more computational-sciency? like do you find it more interesting that flies move their heads in particular ways or that we can model this with deep learning?
@kristinmbranson I love that ♥️
@gaymanifold I think both! I started out mainly working in ML, but have been working on understanding fly behavior for over a decade, and am really interested in the algorithms they use for surviving in their world.