Sebastian Seung
@SebastianSeung
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@FlyWireNews https://t.co/ZUXm93WUll @eye_wire. Read https://t.co/meh9OZPrQk @WSJ Top 10 Nonfiction 2012. @PrincetonNeuro @PrincetonCS
Princeton, New Jersey
Joined March 2010
A historic milestone for neuroscience! It's been a fantastic journey for the #FlyWire Consortium. This special edition of Nature showcases the power of open science, with nine papers that not only describe the fly connectome, but also make discoveries using it.
Big news! The fly connectome is featured on the cover of a special edition of Nature. This is all possible thanks to the collaboration of 292 members of The FlyWire Consortium!.Check out the thread for an overview of the 9 #flywire papers published today
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1/n Ask yourself. what would FDR do? He would hire a million workers and train them for contact tracing, sanitation, and other public health tasks. Kill two birds with one stone: create jobs and contain the virus.
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🧵on Japan's underrated contributions to neural nets. Shun-ichi Amari @UTokyo_News_en @riken_en is another one of my heroes. His 1972 paper on associative memory models modeled Hebbian plasticity using an outer product weight matrix.
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Wow. @Google is cleaning up at the Nobels this year. Yesterday's prize recognized the old Google Brain and today's goes to @GoogleDeepMind! The torch has been passed from @BellLabs.
BREAKING NEWS.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”
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We're done! A historic milestone for neuroscience brought to you by the @FlyWireNews Consortium. Don't take my word for it. See the glory of the fly brain for yourself at
We are releasing a whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly, including ~130k annotated neurons and tens of millions of typed synapses!. Explore the connectome: Reconstruction paper: Annotation paper: 1/6
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Wow. Hopfield model and Boltzmann machine.
BREAKING NEWS.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
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I'm reminded today that the world of science is what I wish the entire world could be: people of different nations, races, creeds, and opinions working together to achieve great things. #sfn2024.
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How are neurons activated by sensory stimuli? For the past century, the only method for addressing this question has been neurophysiology.
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We’re excited to announce FlyWire, the world’s first online community for whole-brain connectomics. Just click on for instant access! In just a few seconds, you can start browsing through an entire fruit fly brain in electron microscopic glory. 1/.
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But is it physics? Hopfield tackled three profound questions about emergence: condensed matter from interactions between elementary particles, the magic of life from interactions between dead molecules, and intelligence/consciousness from interactions between dumb neurons.
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Another shout-out to an unsung hero of the #FlyWire connectome. Ten years ago, Rick Fetter cut a fly brain into 7000 slices, each 1000x thinner than a hair.
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Our “surprisingly popular” algorithm for finding truth even when the majority is wrong. Cover of @nature this week.
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@siwonchoi Thanks @siwonchoi of #SUPERJUNIOR!!! Music has been most famous export from S Korea. Now it's time to export public health. With music and health, we can all be happy 🎶⚕️⚕️.
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70 years ago my late father stepped out of this station to begin life in the U.S. @Yale had taken a chance by awarding a full scholarship to this refugee from N Korea. He returned the favor by graduating summa cum laude. God Bless America, and God Bless Yale! #AmericanDream
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2/ S Korea widely regarded as a role model for fighting #Covid19. The world needs to learn from their success, but most people can’t read Korean. Let’s make the life-saving information in this playbook accessible to people everywhere.
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Want a chance to make scientific history? Decades later the thrilling sequel to the C. elegans connectome is finally within reach! Join the global community mapping the connections between every one of the >100,000 neurons in a fly brain.
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Titan of theoretical physics/neuroscience John Hopfield has won @TheFranklin Medal in Physics!
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3/ Here in the US, I hear a lot of complaining about our government. But hey, it’s we who are the people, right? We should all pitch in and help in any way we can. That’s why we’re staying home to protect each other.
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Murray Hill NJ 1951 Claude Shannon posed the problem of predicting the next word which turned out to be the seed of today's LLMs.
@SebastianSeung @Hamptonism Good stuff from Murray Hill, Florham Park, and Princeton, too 😉.
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What I absolutely love love love is neurons! .Visualization of the "superclasses" of fly neurons.
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4/ And that’s why we’re crowdsourcing this translation. Doing it the old-fashioned way would take longer, and the virus spreads fast. So please share the link, or translate if you can.
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6/ S Korea has succeeded in controlling a major outbreak “without China’s draconian restrictions on speech and movement, or economically damaging lockdowns like those in Europe and the United States.”
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About to celebrate delivery to @IARPAnews of visual cortex reconstruction from a petascale EM dataset acquired by @AllenInstitute . the climax of Phase 2 of the MICrONS program!
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Indeed Marr cites Chomsky as a "true computational theory." But the MIT school of language turned out to be as ineffective as the MIT school of vision. Language is described today by collecting a vast amount of linguistic output, not by a computational theory.
@TonyZador @SebastianSeung Marr was making a strong methodological claim with his levels - that an understanding of the computational level was necessary before proceeding to the algorithmic and then to the implementational level. The first step was the key for him - Chomsky's theory of transformational.
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Quick, what have we learned from the BRAIN Initiative? One sentence or less please.
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Asian countries (China, S Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) have already beaten the virus with "five weapons" of public health. So anyone with common sense would fight the virus by wielding all five weapons.
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Insightful comment. Largest fly neurons have fan-in/out of O(10^3), much greater than typical value. Why? Electrical signals don't spread far inside some super neurons. The neuron therefore behaves as multiple functional units, each with small fan-in/out.
@SebastianSeung That's a huge fan-in.
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@pwlot @alexisgallagher @RoboTeddy The fly connectome comes with predictions of neurotransmitter identity (acetylcholine, GABA, etc) based on the EM images, courtesy @BobQubit @janfunkey
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@dribnet @RogerGrosse @hardmaru @NipsConference I'd like to see a historian figure out why MIT became so anti-neural nets. I always chalked it up to Minsky and Chomsky, towering geniuses who cast long shadows. Another theory is that the neural nets people (Pitts, Wiener) self-destructed.
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neurons, beautiful neurons.
Since the '50 largest neurons' #connectome render with @amyneurons @FlyWireNews has made it's way around the world, I'm sharing an animated version. Including:.Information flow from the ocelli, .50 largest #neurons, .and a LOT of #synapses on one MASSIVE neuron. #neuroscience
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Memories. With @srinituraga at #SfN 2007, waiting to deliver my Presidential Special Lecture, "The Once and Future Science of Neural Networks." Pinstripe suit with hot pink trim by Moschino and I really needed a haircut.
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Central brain is done! Optic lobes well underway. The fly connectome is nearing completion.
The fly central brain synthesizes sensory stimuli into decisions and actions. For the first time, ALL 46,944 branched and far-reaching neurons of both hemispheres of the central brain have been reconstructed and are available via FlyWire.
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@schoppik SOM is the seat of the soul. The axon of the SOM cell (green) ascends toward the Holy Dura Mater in Paradise. SOM struggles to contain the sordid impulses of pyramidal cells (red), studded with thorns and sending axons down to Inferno.
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I dedicate this video to the fly that gave her life for science, but will live forever in silico. She has supercharged the discoveries of the #FlyWire Consortium, and propels us into the digital transformation of neuroscience. Protip: watch with audio on.
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Look carefully. only in Princeton is a fire alarm answered by the "plasma physics department"! @PPPLab
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Shout out to @element_ai for the warm airport welcome! Advice to AI companies: station your recruiters at Montreal airport starting now. Early bird gets the deep learner.
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Awesome! If the other States join too, maybe we could call it the United States of America?
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Flies are highly visual animals. That’s obvious to anyone who has ever tried to swat one. So it should be no surprise that eyes are so prominent on the fly head.
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Congrats! We are all grateful for Google's contributions to the field.
10 years of Connectomics at Google and a new human cortex publication in Science!. It has been a huge honor to pursue brain mapping advances at Google Research with so many amazing colleagues and collaborators. 🙏.
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This is a beautiful exception to the rule that a neuron is a functional unit. Electrical signals have been shown to spread very little inside this cell. This is because neurites loop like crazy, lengthening the path >10x.
#pictureofthemonth: The CT1 large-field neuron operates like 1400 individual cells and forms a microcircuit, which turns excitatory into inhibitory signals. Discovered by the Borst department, this microcircuit is one important puzzle piece in decoding motion vision in fruit
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7/ “The first cases of #Covid19 were reported in the United States and South Korea on the same day.” True! Fact-checked by Snopes.
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All the talk about flattening the curve shows a lack of ambition. The richest country in the world should be able to stop transmission. China and South Korea are succeeding.
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12/ “It’s not just about physical distancing, it’s not just about locking down,” he said. “In China, and in Singapore, in Korea, they really focused on having that comprehensive strategy.”
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This video shows the "cartridges" of chandelier cells (colors) making synapses onto axon initial segments of pyramidal cells (gray). The cartridges resemble candlesticks; hence the name chandelier.
Different cell types in the brain have their own connectivity rules and patterns. In a recently published study, our #neuroscience researchers took a deep dive into the connectomics of an important but enigmatic cell type, the chandelier cell. 🧵1. 📄
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Some people have gotten the impression that I hate backprop. Let's be real. I love backprop. The fly connectome was enabled by an AI system containing an arsenal of convolutional nets trained by backprop.
@GaryMarcus @tdietterich @MurthyLab @sapinker @Ozel_MN @DesplanLab More shocking to AI enthusiasts, backprop seems irrelevant. How do I know that? Because *learning* seems irrelevant. If you rear a fly in total darkness, the visual system seems unaffected to a first approximation.
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Here are his reminiscences about how a solid state physicist ended up theorizing about biology and the brain. And how creative people face the "Now what?" question.
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8/ As has been widely reported, S Korea ramped up to a very high rate of testing early on.
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The @COVID_Translate Project has launched! 75 pages from a whirlwind of volunteer activity over the past 3 days.
Thanks to our amazing volunteers, the COVID19 Response Guidelines by @KoreaCDC are now available in English:
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Our new preprint on cortical connectomics.
Our newest preprint! EM and neural activity images from three million cubic microns of mouse visual cortex. Four scientific vignettes from organelles to synapses to circuit structure and function @BCMHouston @PrincetonNeuro @AllenInstitute @IARPAnews 1/20
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Excitement and nerve-wracking tension no doubt. They're shooting to cut 25,000 slices. each one 40 nanometers thin. That's right---nanometers.
Excitement is in the air #HereAtAllen as our Electron Microscopy team begins sectioning brain samples for the largest #electronmicroscopy dataset ever recorded! 🙌 This is part of a collaborative effort to map nearly a billion synaptic connections in 1mm³ of brain tissue.
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10/ Now that the US and other Western countries are finally catching up with testing, they should study the rest of S Korea’s playbook. Let’s make it possible through translation.
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The theoretical physics approach to neural nets was launched by @HopfieldJohn in this classic 1982 paper that introduced the "energy function" to associative memory models.
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9/ S Korea introduced innovations like drive-thru testing in parking lots and “phone booth” testing in hospitals
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Iceland is the most successful non-Asian country to bring Covid under control (stats at . Like S Korea, Iceland has won without strangling its economy. Here's why it's an interesting role model.
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I'm immensely proud of my students, postdocs, and staff for pulling off this feat. What an adventure!.
Last week, we released our IARPA MICrONS electron microscopy (EM) reconstruction with functional data. True to ARPA heritage, this was a moonshot program for every stage. 1/n.
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I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
Sydney's dead. RIP.
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13/ Jung Eun-kyeong, now legendary @KoreaCDC head. A ‘reporter asked. about. a rumor. that she sleeps less than an hour each night. “More than an hour,” she corrected him, before moving on to the next question.’ /end.
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11/ “Mike Ryan, the @WHO’s emergencies head, warned on Sunday that lockdowns wouldn’t be enough to control the pandemic and urged governments to focus on identifying and isolating infected people and their contacts.”.
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DeepMath 2020 ( is now accepting abstract submissions on mathematical.theory of deep neural networks! This year's amazing speakers include @GittaKutyniok @rbaraniuk, Demba Ba, Rene Vidal, Stefanie Jegelka, Eero Simoncelli & more!.
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Fantastic team of volunteer translators finalizing plan for v0.9 release at noon Monday! Lots of quality control still left to be done.
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A special shout-out to Krzysztof Kruk, an amateur scientist from Poland and veteran of @eye_wire. He singlehandedly annotated the majority of neurons in the #FlyWire optic lobe, and wrote software that aided others doing the annotation. What a hero!.
Volunteers played a key part in validating a gigantic neuroscience study mapping the fruit-fly brain. It shows what can be achieved through crowdsourcing research.
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@pwlot @alexisgallagher @RoboTeddy @BobQubit @janfunkey These predictions can be cross-checked against transcriptomic maps made by people like @YerbolZK @yoojuyoun
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6/n So hire a million public health workers. People who can't work at their restaurant/bar jobs. College students who can't get summer internships. All the people struggling to find decent employment could have a job that pays well and feels meaningful.
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@TheFranklin His 1982 and 1984 PNAS papers launched a generation of theoretical physicists (eventually including me) into neural net research. Well worth reading for style as well as content.
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Don't miss the symposium "Connectomics: a new era of dissemination and discovery," chaired by yrs truly! An all-star cast of speakers on how connectomic resources are enabling new insights into the brain. 7-9pm ET Oct 29 @neuromatch Register at
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Based on this circuit, I conjecture that flies can perceive illusory contours and corners. If my predictions turn out to be accurate, it will be like winning a war before ever firing a shot.
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TL;DR New preprint with discovery: many interneuron types in the fly visual system function as highly specific normalizers.
My new preprint attempts to explain the function of interneuron diversity in the fly visual system. The answer (or at least the beginning of it) falls in your lap once you have the connectome.
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I'm delighted to announce that I will be serving as Chief Research Scientist @Samsung while also continuing my research and teaching @PrincetonNeuro & @PrincetonCS
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@GaryMarcus @tdietterich @MurthyLab @sapinker @Ozel_MN @DesplanLab More shocking to AI enthusiasts, backprop seems irrelevant. How do I know that? Because *learning* seems irrelevant. If you rear a fly in total darkness, the visual system seems unaffected to a first approximation.
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I am continuing to manage my @Princeton lab remotely, and more tweets about our advances in connectomics are coming soon. @ylecun has written about how the “dual affiliation model” is benefiting both industry and academia.
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Yet another thread to summarize "What have we learned from the BRAIN Initiative?" Now responses related to non-human research.
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Calling all GUI wizards and Raspberry Pi gurus! Volunteer to write code that SAVES LIVES by joining @DJCohenEtAl @Princeton MAE team building critical care ventilator for COVID-19 patients. Please spread the word! cc @covidbrains 1/
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Reconstructing a whole brain means you can map sensation to cognition #FlyWire.
Beautiful work from @UCSB: researchers have mapped the fly’s visual brain systems & how they connect to the fly brain’s navigation center. #NEIfunded @SungSoo_111 @MurthyLab @SebastianSeung @FU_Berlin @HHMINEWS. @Nature:
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Enjoyed his previous books in my youth. This looks great too!.
1/3 Initial thoughts on Gil Strang’s new linear algebra book. Short story -> the book is absolutely terrific and I think anyone with a linear algebra background will enjoy it immensely.
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Last year we completed the whole fly brain. Onward to an entire fly CNS! (brain + ventral nerve cord, analog of spinal cord).
The BANC is open. Deposit your expertise in the newest community-created connectome:
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My new preprint attempts to explain the function of interneuron diversity in the fly visual system. The answer (or at least the beginning of it) falls in your lap once you have the connectome.
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Kunihiko Fukushima @nhk_strl created the Cognitron (1975) and Neocognitron (1980), the forerunners of today's convolutional nets.
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9/n There is no way out. We have no choice but to adopt and implement containment. Unless we capitulate and let the epidemics run their course. Please no more defeatist talk that containment is no longer possible. /end.
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4/n Many people have come to the conclusion that lockdown is necessary. But don't be naive and think that some weeks/months of lockdown will solve our problem. Lockdown is only the first step. it gives us time to implement containment.
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Kaoru Nakano was also @UTokyo_News_en. His Associatron (1972) quantized the weights, and was used for heteroassociation.
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@doristsao reminded me of that day at the White House. ages and ages ago it seems. Now it's my turn. what have *I* learned from the BRAIN Initiative?
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If it was a power struggle over AI safety, why wouldn't the board take the moral high ground and say so? Instead they merely insinuate that he is dishonest. But the dishonesty is evidently about matters they can't reveal. It sounds fishy. .
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Amari's neural field model (1977) anticipated later work in computational neuroscience on the role of continuous dynamical attractors in short-term memory.
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@ylecun is saying those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Can any of his critics point to the best recent papers showing that generative models find representations that are helpful for visual recognition and understanding?.
Modeling the world for action by generating pixel is as wasteful and doomed to failure as the largely-abandoned idea of "analysis by synthesis". Decades ago, there was a big debate in ML about the relative advantages of generative methods vs discriminative methods for.
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President Eisgruber @Princeton calls for round of applause to honor @HopfieldJohn joining press conference by Zoom!
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As the old saw goes, functional connectivity has little to do with connectivity and even less to do with function.
Finally the rename functional connectivity -> correlation network is happening.
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Congrats @sdorkenw for winning the Larry Katz Prize! A great honor for Sven and a tribute to a brilliant neuroscientist who did so much to advance our knowledge of neural circuits.
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With Seiji Ogawa at the Masao Ito Symposium in Tokyo. He discovered the BOLD signal at Bell Labs If there is a Nobel for fMRI he should get it.
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