Jonathan A Michaels @jonathanmichaels@qoto.org
How do we move? I study brains and machines at Western University. Incoming Assistant Professor at York University (July, 2024). Full-time human.
Joined Nov 2022
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
Some personal update: I will join the University of Waterloo as Assistant Professor and Vector Institute as Faculty Member in 2024! I am *very* excited to be back in Canada to help grow the Canadian AI ecosystem! Please apply if you are interested in a PhD at the intersection of NLP and ML!
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex
The brain is the hungriest organ in the body (using 20% of all energy consumed). But most of it is not used for "computing"; it's used to send messages around.
Thanks to all our fantastic contributors and mentors who supported this work at every stage!
Olivier Codol is the first author (not on mastodon), and thanks to Mehrdad Kashefi, @andpru and @paulgribble
Finally, MotorNet provides a framework that can easily be expanded to more complex control scenarios. The only limit is your imagination!
New, complex tasks can be implemented, trained, and visualized quickly, speeding up the research cycle and providing tools that can be used by other researchers in the community
To get started quickly — do a 'pip install motornet', check out the many tutorials included in the repo, or even open a tutorial directly in a colab notebook with a single click
https://oliviercodol.github.io/MotorNet/build/html/tutorials/train-net.html
In the preprint, we lay out the structure of the toolbox, show a few examples of some classic motor control tasks, and replications of some of our favourite modeling work
MotorNet is an open-source python toolbox built on Tensorflow that makes training neural networks to control realistic biomechanical models fast and accessible to non-experts, enabling teams to focus on concepts and ideas over implementation.
https://oliviercodol.github.io/MotorNet/build/html/index.html
When we set out to study how neural networks interact with biomechanical models, we found that separate platforms are needed for neural and biomechanical modeling, and that existing biomechanical models are not differentiable — making training slow or unreliable
Modeling motor control typically requires stitching together multiple neural and biomechanical modeling frameworks.
So, we created MotorNet — a toolbox to study neural architectures/learning, muscle dynamics, delays, noise, and tasks, all under one roof!
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
Hello! I just migrated my account to the neuromatch server, time to reintroduce! #introduction
I'm Crystal, I'm a neuroscientist interested in visual development. I work for the NIH BRAIN Initiative. I enjoy exploring science and art through quilting, crafting, 3D printing. Once I 3D printed my own brain and it's white matter.
I can also be found in the woods with my two dogs, foraging for mushrooms.
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
I've always found poor overall quality of research produced by honest actors to be a bigger problem than outright academic fraud. Somehow the latter never seems interesting or surprising to me whereas the former points out to serious systemic problems in scientific formation. How do we reinstitute rigorous methodological training, genuine curiosity, deep theoretical thinking, programmatic and systematic effort, careful execution in scientific practice? Seems to be the harder problem to solve.
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
More measurements thoughts, control over whether and how "ability data" gets used is some real power. For example, there are big gender effects in how hiring managers look at grades. Grades aren't just taken as equal across all people and they're tangled up in stereotypes. I'll never forget the convo I had with an engineering manager who said he wanted a "B plus guy" over a "A plus girl" because "it's not sexism, I just want people who deal with the real world." Classic bias WITH measurements.
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
Consciousness: Matter or EMF?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.1024934/full
After all, you can read information from the brain's electric fields:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119058
And ephaptic coupling can drive spiking:
https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.17.524451
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
Hebbian deep learning!
"an algorithm that trains deep neural networks, without any feedback, target, or error signals. As a result, it achieves efficiency by avoiding weight transport, non-local plasticity, time-locking of layer updates, iterative equilibria, and (self-) supervisory or other feedback signals (...) Its increased efficiency and biological compatibility do not trade off accuracy compared to state-of-the-art bio-plausible learning, but rather improve it."
Jonathan A Michaels
boosted
Super excited to share our new work showing that recurrent feedback from hippocampal replays to PFC can implement a form of planning that matches human behavior in a sequential decision making task!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.16.523429v1 with Guillaume Hennequin and Marcelo Mattar (sadly not on Mastodon yet!)
How do we move? I study brains and machines at Western University. Incoming Assistant Professor at York University (July, 2024). Full-time human.
Joined Nov 2022
