Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson@qoto.org

Setup for the HHMI Science meeting tomorrow. Is this the future of conference poster sessions? I tend to view everything as optimization steps along some unknown cost function. We are in an interesting place right now! Love seeing people try something new!
#moa

@elenarivas I started by looking at the following list of a few people I knew. I've mostly been following back people who follow me as long as I can get some idea who they are from their bio. You could try posting an introduction with the tag # introduction (no space, didn't want to actually tag) and some info about yourself? Here's what I posted: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/109263698502379084

@emilymbender I think it is server dependent, but the messages I have seen said that it should get better as the admins add more hardware to adapt to the new load. I'm on qoto.org which seems zippy. The character limit is 65K so one doesn't need to make threads. I'm not sure if that is good for me or not. To get my posts to fit in Twitter, I used to have to go back and remove all the "I think"s from the starts of my sentences. Now I need to remember to do that all on my own 😅 .

@barefootstache Interesting that you can still attend remotely! I'm helping out teaching a course at a university this quarter, and will be participating virtually (I have health concerns that make me more concerned about COVID). I'm nervous that I won't be able to connect well with the students, but will do my best!

@Pat @albertcardona @ichoran Great points! Agree! I personally like watching recordings of talks (I'm a 1.5x speeder), particularly because if I zone out for a minute I can rewind.
Agree also about the different modes of communication available to different types of participants, and it is interesting to think about the two different types of experiences for those in person vs virtual. I've definitely experienced this. We had a meeting at my work about whether to stop allowing virtual participation in meetings. I have no idea what the people in person experienced, but those on Zoom were treated to a comedy via the chat.
Thanks for the info on qoto and new instances. I've so far been enjoying hearing from scientists slightly outside my normal echo chamber of CS & neuro researchers. A few people I know have talked about setting up their own instance focused on open science, not sure if it will go anywhere.

@albertcardona @ichoran Ya, it's a mistake I won't make again 😅

@ichoran I miss your questions! Honestly one of the reasons I took the job at Janelia to begin with was your questions when I interviewed -- someone had thought about the same things I was thinking about! It's great to find you on mastodon!

Interesting to know that conferences have changed!! I have only been to CVPR in person, which is always weird.

I agree that we are not doing well at organizing hybrid. I think we're much better at all virtual, but maybe we could be better at hybrid if we tried, though maybe the incentives aren't there.

I've been thinking about how we can use what we learned about remote work & virtual meetings from the pandemic. It would be great if we didn't have to release lots of carbon to meet, and could live wherever we wanted. But, there are downsides to virtual everything, particularly with our current tech & practices.

Should we really be trying to go back to how things were? Can we learn from our pandemic experience? What are the best practices & tech for setting up virtual and hybrid meetings? Do we really need VR and avatars for virtual/hybrid to work? Are there advantages, for certain kinds of people, of virtual platforms?

This is likely a personal preference: I think virtual works as well as in-person when communication is mostly one-directional, e.g. prepared talks and, to some extent, poster sessions. If conferences are mainly talks and posters, I think they should be virtual.

I am hoping that n-way virtual communication could be better with better organization and technology. Places like CERN have been doing hybrid & virtual meetings for a long time. Can we learn from them? https://qz.com/1832018/how-physicists-solved-your-zoom-video-conferencing-problems

Now to be a bit cynical -- I think those in charge are those that did/do well in our old/current system, but that system is not great for everyone. Again, this is personal, but I'm better at expressing myself in writing. I'm more likely to ask a question at a conference if I can enter a virtual queue. God I dread mixing at conferences. This one time there was "science speed dating" at a conference. It was torture. Maybe for some people sometimes virtual can be better?

Anyways, I thought I'd use this virtual platform to bring up these ideas! I know many disagree on this and are happy to get back to conferences. I'd also like to mention that for people who continue to be concerned about COVID, going back to normal is not yet possible (will it ever be??). For me, this article rings true: "For those still trying to duck covid, the isolation is worse than ever" https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/26/covid-pandemic-still-isolating/

#moa

@mishaahrens @NicoleCRust
Agree 100%! That's why I'm excited :). It would be very hard (maybe impossible?) to understand complex, heterogeneous systems without these measurements. I think we don't have most the methods we need to make use of this data to get "understanding" of how all the pieces fit together. I think one of the factors holding us back is the lack of these methods (I'm betting on combinations of human & machine intelligence). I also think ideas of how to measure how well these methods work (measurements of measurements of measurements...) are one of our biggest holes.

@albertcardona @NicoleCRust For me it is called "Delete and redraft", I'm on the website.

Hello all! #introduction

I'm a Group Leader at HHMI Janelia Research Campus working at the intersections of #ComputerVision, #MachineLearning, #DataScience, #Neuroscience, #Ethology, #HCI, #SoftwareEngineering. I work on using computer vision, machine learning, and technology in general to help us gain insight into biology. My most cited work involves tracking and behavior analysis of flies and mice. I love algorithms and trying to understand how and when they work and what they're good at. But also I'm an engineer and want to solve problems however I can, regardless of elegance!

I like sunshine, being outside, #climbing, and #crosswords. I dream of someday leaving it all behind and moving to Bishop or Yosemite or the Rockies or something.

Lab website: https://www.janelia.org/lab/branson-lab
Publication history: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=g558OVoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Github: https://github.com/kristinbranson/

#nomoa

@PessoaBrain I saw something about posting the first post public, and then replies to it unlisted. https://www.marcozehe.de/a-few-tips-on-mastodon/

On qoto.org, there's a 65535 character limit per post. I'm super verbose, so I'm not sure that is a good thing for me :).

@SergeBelongie Looks super interesting! I'm glad to see this is a topic people are exploring!

@NicoleCRust One of the things I worry about & am excited about is complexity of systems. As we measure more about the animal, or in an ANN where we can measure everything, how do we understand it all together? If we have all this information, how do we make sense of it? Can we extract bite-sized principles? Is that enough?