Johannes Kappel @jjneuro@qoto.org

@patrickmineault @neuralreckoning @ShahabBakht

There’s early work from Srini Turaga’s lab on a simulation of the #Drosophila optic lobes, for the #vEM reconstructed #connectome from photoreceptors to the direction-selective neurons:

Tschopp FD, Reiser MB, Turaga SC. A connectome based hexagonal lattice convolutional network model of the Drosophila visual system. arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04793. 2018 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04793

I love this MouseNet paper: lots of detailed work to build an ANN that's mouse-visual-cortex-like, with the right fan-in, fan-out, cortical layers, area-to-area connectivity. You'd think this detailed modelling work would make the model a better fit to mouse brain data, but no: an off-the-shelf VGGNet is better at explaining mouse cortex.

I think this means that because high capacity ANNs are universal approximators, the implicit prior from architectural choices ends up being quite weak; the dataset (e.g. ImageNet vs. Ecoset vs. mouse naturalistic data) and the task (e.g. object recognition , self-supervision, etc.) are probably more important.

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010427

3,013 neurons, half a million synapses: the complete #connectome of the whole #Drosophila larval brain!

Winding, Pedigo et al. 2022. "The connectome of an insect brain" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.28.516756v1

We’ve mapped and analysed its circuit architecture, from sensory neurons to brain output neurons, as reconstructed from volume electron microscopy, and here is what we found. 1/

#neuroscience #connectomics #vEM #volumeEM

Still finding my bearings here.

Just left Birdland, not sure for now long.
As a scientist, management’s dog whistle against Fauci was too much for me to take.

In 1925, Dr. Cecilia Payne completed her PhD thesis, described as “the most brilliant ever written in astronomy.” At a time when few #women entered academia, Payne discovered what the universe is made of. Her work began a revolution in astrophysics.

Dr. Payne-Gaposchkin became the 1st female professor & 1st female department chair at Harvard. Given most of us remember names like Darwin & Newton, we should also celebrate Payne. #science #space

Read more at https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201501/physicshistory.cfm

This is a fun* website that gives you context for any flights you are planning to take.

https://flightfree.org/flight-emissions-calculator

*fun as in good product design, not that it will make you feel good to use...

New result!
A ubiquitous cortical signature: Beta is stronger in deep layers, gamma is stronger in superficial layers. So robust you can find layer 4 by the crossover point, everywhere.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.30.510398v2

#neuroscience

Leave Twitter just because it's systemically broken and run by a toxic white man with unchecked power?

Please, I'm an academic.

Poster printed. No SfN until 1. Time for an overdue #introduction

🐘💨🙋‍♂️I’m a theoretical neuroscientist who likes to hang out with experimentalists. Somewhat-recent PhD with György Buzsáki/John Rinzel (NYU) now a postdoc with Blake Richards/Adrien Peyrache (McGill). I study the neurodynamics of sleep & how they can do computational work in biological and artificial neural networks

Sometimes-snarky toots about #neuro #neuroAI #PhilosophyOfScience and life at the interface of theory and experiment

Apparently I’m supposed to post an #introduction so here we go - I’m Kate, an ex-pat Kiwi living in the UK since 1990 and a behavioural neuroscientist studying the neural basis of cognitive mapping. PhD with Richard Morris and postdoc with John O’Keefe, then own lab at UCL psychology in the IBN (Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience) for many years. Recently became Head of School, Psychology and Neuroscience at Glasgow. Married to Dr Axona, have 3 daughters and a grumpy cat.