Hi all, instead of a re- #introduction after moving instances, I'd like to introduce you to my graduate student Peter Salvino, who passed away under tragic circumstances last week.

Because of his way too early passing, most of you didn't get to know him. So I wanted to make sure my #neuroscience community knows how brilliant and kind a scientist he was. Peter wore many hats in the lab. Being my very first student, he built with me, and knew the ins and outs of every bit of hardware and software. He was also a masterful engineer and inventor, and had a keen scientific mind. He knew what the big questions in the field were and was completely fearless in going after them. We will slowly publish all his great contributions, so you will read his name again.

Most importantly, he was so generous to his lab mates. He helped every single person in the lab, with such selflessness and genuine humbleness. He was really loved by all of us. This is such a huge loss to our field. He was destined to greatness.

Peter's family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help support research similar to his at Northwestern. They welcome any contributions to honor the memory of this amazing human being.

And, it’s a wrap — #papersubmitted 🔥🙌🎁👌 and the code released — legit one of the best releases of DLC is up now! New GUI, new models that work on nearly 100 species 🎉— will drop the preprint when I’m back from #skiing 😘 but check it out now… #SuperAnimals are a gooooo!!!

This is ZERO training…

Going forward, #DeepLabCut updates will come via medium (and GitHub of course), but not the bird. This is sad, as the science Twitter community, I believe, was so important in getting out the word early on our very first code release and paper. But, it’s not okay anymore 💔

📣🚨To get the latest updates on our code releases going forward, please see our medium blog deeplabcut.medium.com and all resources linked on our homepage: DeepLabCut.org - take care #deeplabcutters 🙏🏼💜

@seabikeblog This looks like a more dangerous design than there is now. Why are they doing this?

I'm gonna keep posting this until one of you fucking boosts it

Last night Colleen Gillon, a PhD student in my lab, passed her PhD defence with flying colours! No corrections!!!

On that note, as part of her thesis, Dr. Gillon made a beautiful, easy-to-use code base for the data from our
Allen Institute OpenScope project (see a pre-print here: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20).

Check it out, analyse the data, let us know what you find! Here's the code:

github.com/colleenjg/OpenScope

Learning from unexpected events in the neocortical microcircuit

Scientists have long conjectured that the neocortex learns the structure of the environment in a predictive, hierarchical manner. According to this conjecture, expected, predictable features are differentiated from unexpected ones by comparing bottom-up and top-down streams of information. It is theorized that the neocortex then changes the representation of incoming stimuli, guided by differences in the responses to expected and unexpected events. In line with this conjecture, different responses to expected and unexpected sensory features have been observed in spiking and somatic calcium events. However, it remains unknown whether these unexpected event signals occur in the distal apical dendrites where many top-down signals are received, and whether these signals govern subsequent changes in the brain’s stimulus representations. Here, we show that both somata and distal apical dendrites of cortical pyramidal neurons exhibit distinct unexpected event signals that systematically change over days. These findings were obtained by tracking the responses of individual somata and dendritic branches of layer 2/3 and layer 5 pyramidal neurons over multiple days in primary visual cortex of awake, behaving mice using two-photon calcium imaging. Many neurons in both layers 2/3 and 5 showed large differences between their responses to expected and unexpected events. Interestingly, these responses evolved in opposite directions in the somata and distal apical dendrites. These differences between the somata and distal apical dendrites may be important for hierarchical computation, given that these two compartments tend to receive bottom-up and top-down information, respectively. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

www.biorxiv.org
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