Richard Gao @_rdgao Twitter profile

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Richard Gao

5 years

Somebody let me teach a full college class this summer at UCSD lol: 20 lectures on Neural Signal Processing. All course material here: The labs should be especially useful - they are designed to build incrementally towards DSP concepts in neuroscience.

GitHub - rdgao/COGS118C: COGS118C [Neural Signal Processing] @ UCSanDiego

COGS118C [Neural Signal Processing] @ UCSanDiego. Contribute to rdgao/COGS118C development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

one of my postdoc fellowship apps got rejected and I honestly don't know whether to laugh or cry at this tragicomedy like, thank you??? 🥲 I do hope to meet this reviewer one day and convince them that I'm actually just extremely talented at sneaking into great labs

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

have we done this one yet?

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

Interrupting my stream of basketball tweets to bring you our latest paper, out in @NatureHumBehav today... ...in which some of my closest friends in grad school and I managed to publish a paper inspired by our collective identity crisis. Thread for all you CogSci nerds here:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

Literally all of my notes from Cosyne19 - a lot of manifolds (neural and behavioral), but also a lot of embodiment, coding, and philosophy. Warning: it's really long, so if you want to go through the whole conference as me (but without all the natas) ...

COSYNE19: Neural & Behavioral #MANIFOLDS, Embodied & Embedded Brains, Coding & Causality

From all this, I gather that systems neuroscience might be converging onto one huge canonical correlation analysis: on the one end, you can measure latent behavioral states that describes observable...

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

I bumped into a student from my summer class and he said he was applying to grad schools. I asked him what field he's thinking about and he said: "computational neuroscience because I want to do what you do" and I'm just letting the internet know that I didn't cry

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

20 days

My #AI4Neuro magnum opus: Discovery of spiking network model parameters constrained by neural recordings, using simulation-based inference & generative “AI”. (aka the answer to “how the f did you end up in Tübingen?”) Here's what we have in store:

Deep inverse modeling reveals dynamic-dependent invariances in neural circuit mechanisms

Neural population dynamics are shaped by many cellular, synaptic, and network properties. Not only is it important to understand how coordinated changes in circuit parameters alter neural activity,...

www.biorxiv.org

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

I'm probably lighting my career on fire with one tweet but this has made the rounds and it (justifiably) does not look pretty. But since I'm a collaborators on this, I feel like I should at least try to inform because the article does not do the (good) science justice. 1/

Helena

@Helena_LB

6 years

So they CRISPRd stem cells with a Neanderthal genetic variant. Then grew "Neanderoids", small brain organoids, with the purpose of hooking them up to crab robots, in order to have robowars between modern human organoidbots and Neanderoidbots. Okay then.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 months

just finishing my reviews for neurips 2024: I'm happy to report that we have solved the brain, once again, and at least 3 different times. (please dear god take me out of the neuroscience / cognitive science reviewer pool)

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

Are oscillations and LFPs epiphenomenal? Are spikes epiphenomenal? Am I epiphenomenal? Consolidating a continued debate.

The (Epi)Phenomenal Oscillation, Spike, and LFP

The one where I write down all in the same place why oscillations and LFPs are not epiphenomenal because I’m tired of having the same damn argument over and over again.

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

holy crap this is seriously stellar. half a semester worth of material in one blog post.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

10 months

I'm presenting at NeurIPS next week, lots of things to say about this paper, but 2 things I'm most proud of is that multiple reviewers said, despite the very complicated title: 1. it's well-written, and 2. "the idea is simple and straightforward, but not in a bad way" (!?)

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

Executable Research Article for the ECoG timescales paper is finally live ( @bradleyvoytek @thmspfffr @rudyvdbrink ): same paper, but all figs can now be generated on-site (+ more)! ...you bet I'm milking all the tweetprints I can out of this one paper

Neuronal timescales are functionally dynamic and shaped by cortical microarchitecture

Invasive electrophysiological recording measures neuronal transmembrane current timescales across human cortex, which lengthens from sensory to association regions, follows variations in ion channel...

elifesciences.org

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

before Lisbon, I gave a @mackelab teatime talk about surfing as a beginner to prepare folks for the frustration but it was actually about the PhD: in SD, I realized surfing as a beginner is a lot like starting a PhD, when you, invariably, also suck this was my guide for both:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

you know you're a senior PhD student when a simple blog about @neuromatch turns into a medium-sized rant about the institution, AND a historical review of cognitive science and computational neuroscience. take-home message: NMA2020 was f-ing rad 🎉🔥🧠

NMA2020: (Late) Thoughts on NMA, Higher Education, and Computational Neuroscience [11/52]

It’s like one of those movie scenes, where you get invited to Charlie’s chocolate factory, and somebody opens the front gate and all of a sudden what looks like a shack from the outside is actually a...

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

it's happening folks I'm defending my PhD on Oct 26, 2020, 11AM PST. there will be ECoG, PSDs, 1/f, E-I balance, timescales, gradients, organoids (no consciousness though), and moar brain data it's been real, neurotwitter. Zoom link in abstract & here:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

uh holy shit if true

Whole-brain in vivo base editing reverses autistic-like behaviors in mice

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorder associated with deficits in social communication and stereotypical behaviors. Numerous ASD-related genetic mutations...

www.biorxiv.org

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

even cognitive scientists don't know what cognitive science is (but at least we've heard of it)

Liuba Papeo

@ljuba_pi

3 years

You would be surprised how many neuroscientists don’t know what cognitive science is.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

I have a "thing" for well-written reviews, and this one is immediately at the top of the list: informative, beautifully and clearly written, and very well structured. should be an exemplar text even if you're not interested in the particular topic

Computational models link cellular mechanisms of neuromodulation to large-scale neural dynamics

Nature Neuroscience - Drawing from advances in mathematics and related fields, we show that biophysical models of large-scale neural dynamics can help to bridge the gap between neuromodulation at...

www.nature.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

having been thwarted by covid once already, I was waiting until my ass is in an office chair to tweet this: I am in Tübingen! moving during peak pandemic is life on legendary-mode, but I'm extremely grateful for all the people that reached out to feed and/or welcome me!

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

important life update: i've found boba in Tübingen. it's run by chinese people, and it's actually good. i think we'll make it out here🧋🧘

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

also, and I quote: "...oscillations as a functional readout are a very simple, ubiquitous and theoretically entirely understood phenomenon of coupled neural systems..." WELL SHIT why didn't nobody tell me???

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

holy shitballs - I mean brainballs - our oscillating organoid paper finally, finally got published last week. I wrote about the entire (5-year) process and explained the science here: It's an insider's look into this whole thing. I think it's hilarious.

Oscillating Organoids: Second Research Paper Published!

In hindsight, there was some bad luck, and also mistakes on our part. But by and large, and only because it is now officially over, I can say that it was a great learning experience. I shit you not,...

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

in today's episode of "I work at the complex intersection of biological and machine intelligence"

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

reading Eve Marder reviews makes me feel like my PhD diploma is a participation award I got at a neuroscience-themed kindergarten "congratulations!! you know slightly more than nothing!"

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

fancy pdf version of my PhD MAGNUM OPUS is alive with @thmspfffr @rudyvdbrink @bradleyvoytek , absolute joy working with these guys & @eLife throughout the process (thanks @martin_a_vinck ) blog post for "behind the scenes" to come, long-ass thread here:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

I had the distinct pleasure of writing something for @SCglobalbrain about dynamical systems in the brain, #neuralmanifold , and some great Cosyne19 presentations. Adding to the pantheon of "your brain is an orchestra" analogies. Really digging the dope artwork!

Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain

@SCGlobalBrain

5 years

New on SCGB news, @_rdgao tackles neural manifolds and describes new tools for finding them: #neuralmanifold #cosyne19

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

made this cartoon about reading papers, very proud of the chuckles i got today (i feel like i may have seen this and subconsciously ripped it off from somewhere...)

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

A quick tutorial/blog post (with code) on the Hilbert Transform and instantaneous amplitude/phase measures in (M)EEG/ECoG/LFP, where I find out scipy.signal.hilbert() is a lie. Perfect light reading for your plane ride to #SfN18

Roemer Has It: The Hilbert Transform, Instantaneous Power/Phase/Frequency, and Negative Frequencies...

The one where I find out scipy has been lying to me this whole time.

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

i spent 2 full days last week tearing my hair out "debugging" code that was failing on the cluster turns out, i wasn't allocating enough memory and the entire solution was to add another 0 to the job script remember, kids: it's not imposter syndrome if you're actually an idiot

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

a bit late but finally finished the COSYNE2022 blogpost. In it: 1. some works I found particularly interesting at the main conference 2. musings on "how to conference" 3. a report about our (best!) workshop on neural timescales with @roxana_zeraati

COSYNE22: Reporting on Main Conference and Timescales Workshop, and Some Reflections.

I accidentally wrote a small book about a conference I went to. Again.

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

1 year

I'm a bit of a connoisseur when it comes to faking neural time series, and Julius' thing is really, really good. why waste GPU on fake images when you can use DDPMs to make fake brain data? also, we're at Bernstein this week (...if you still need to fake data for your poster)

Machine Learning in Science

@mackelab

1 year

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have been a game changer for image & audio generation. But can they also be used for neural signals? With Julius Vetter, @jakhmack & @_rdgao , we adapt DDPMs to generate multivariate and densely sampled EEG, LFP & ECoG signals! 1/6

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

rant of the day: we NEED a better f-ing way to catalogue oscillations other than just frequency there's a billion features, collapsing it down to a single number that also ROUGHLY falls within a 30Hz range helps nobody, esp when they correlate to every f-ing thing in behavior

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

we know there is a diversity of cell types, network topographies, and other physiological mechanisms that shape network dynamics. can we include them all while automating fitting spiking networks to real brain data? Poster III-38 tonight at #cosyne23

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

finally got around to finishing this one: an (n=1) insider look at how some schmuck (me) bumbled through teaching a whole course on analyzing brain signals at a frigging R1 institution. I can't not lol when I think about this absurd situation. 4/52

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

nobody: how's your cultural integration going? me:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

"sell me this pen" except it's even more useless than a pen. It's your research. plus some thoughts on the narrative and the creative component of problem-creation in science. 2/52:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

1 year

I have sinned so you don't need to: one million simulations of a 28-dim network, save your grad student some time and emotional energy

Machine Learning in Science

@mackelab

1 year

We know that the diversity of cell types, network topographies, and other factors shape network dynamics. Can we include more as free parameters in spiking networks & fit them to real neural recordings? See @_rdgao for inverting clustered AdEx networks with sbi Session II, C-07

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 months

18 months ago, there was the Nth re-run of "are oscillations real?" Twitter debate, in which @dlevenstein referenced a dinky rant I wrote 2 years before THAT now, we have a real review/perspective paper—feel free to cite in future re-runs of this debate aka literally right now

Sander van Bree

@sandervanbree

6 months

Preprint alert 📢 with @dlevenstein , @prokraustinator , Bradley Voytek, @_rdgao In this work, we evaluate the theoretical status of neural oscillations and local field potentials generally. A thread... 🧵

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

I have 30 Whitecastle sliders. If you or your friend is hungry at a poster, or just plain hungry, uh...reply here for a slider I guess. How long would these last? #SfN19 @overheardsfn

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

telling non-academic friend about #cosyne23 and this is definitely the appropriate reaction

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

Terry Sejnowski, wearing the Terry Vest under a suit jacket, just talked to a whole #COSYNE19 crowd about oscillations and traveling waves, also said that oscillations are nonsinusoidal and bursting. I feel so validated after a week of single units and latent manifolds.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

what I like the most about this is that all the raw data are freely available, and all the code and intermediate data are live here (albeit ugly): so anyone can go and prove us wrong, right now, and you can save everyone some time through the peer review

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

Long story short: there WILL NOT BE Neanderthal vs. homo sapien organoid robot battles! That doesn't seem to be a direct quote, I don't know why tf Alysson would say that, if he did, and I don't know why that sentence would be written that way in the article if he didn't. smh. 2/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

sentient AI to review scientific papers

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

There will NOT be pitting robots against each other - neurotypical, autistic, or Neanderthal. Not in the next 10 years and certainly not on my watch. The point of the robot is to see how interacting with the environment shapes early neurodevelopment. NOT BATTLEBOTS. 9/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

the bittersweet feeling of finishing, and soon leaving the lab gang and my home for the last 6 years, was overcome only by the overwhelming support of @bradleyvoytek , mentors, friends, family, and all the kind messages. alas, got to leave the nest - across the pond to Tübingen!

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

thesis is officially approved, and defense talk is online: find both here: final week in San Diego, after 6 years...holy shit. too many feelings for a tweet, the least of which is how cringe it is to watch myself give a talk

Bridging cognition and neurobiology with large-scale cortical...

UCSD Cognitive Science PhD Defense on Oct. 26, 2020.Science starts at ~6:00 minute mark. It's so weird to watch myself give a talk...For write-ups of the wor...

www.youtube.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

T-2 hours my brain: you can do it! here's all the words to lose yourself good luck spaghetti 😀

Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

it's happening folks I'm defending my PhD on Oct 26, 2020, 11AM PST. there will be ECoG, PSDs, 1/f, E-I balance, timescales, gradients, organoids (no consciousness though), and moar brain data it's been real, neurotwitter. Zoom link in abstract & here:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

10 months

i am but a humble neuroscientist walking amongst the gpu-rich, but SFN did give me the superpower of going to bed at 3 and showing up at 8:30 4 days in a row

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

The goal is not to build a robot because "fuck it why not". The goal (at least mine) is to get at one of the fundamental questions (brain in a vat) in philosophy & cogsci. I don't know if they are conscious, but I'm fairly sure they are much less conscious than lab mice. 7/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

Jordan Peterson reenacting the moment of existential dread every comp neuro PhD student faces when they first get told "all models are wrong", 8.5/10 performance

manny

@mannyfidel

3 years

listen to this clip if not only because there are millions of people who believe these two are some of the world's smartest minds

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day 9 of @neuromatch : control systems theory after HMM and Kalman filter, boy it really makes learning easier when somebody put a lot of thought and effort into designing course curriculum. this makes me almost look forward to reinforcement learning tomorrow. almost.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

"To dismiss observable signals as an epiphenomenon assumes a level of knowledge that no one has ... The attitude boils down to “they don’t play a role because we kind of already know how the brain works”. No, you don’t. No one does." from @MillerLabMIT

A “controversy” about whether brain waves play a functional role.

An article in Scientific American discusses the debate about whether brain waves have a function or whether they are an epiphenomenon: Do Brain Waves Conduct Neural Activity Like a Symphony? The…

ekmillerlab.mit.edu

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

a few people have told me recently that I should not let humility get in the way of celebrating milestones and achievements, and they were right. so here's a very public reminder to myself that I'm a baaaaaad man. (ok more serious thread below, on failures in academia)

Jakob Macke

@jakhmack

3 years

While we're at it, and as @_rdgao is way to modest too mention it himself: He was recently also awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship! We are extremely happy to have Richard in our group @mackelab @ml4science @uni_tue , and immensely enjoy doing science with him!

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

12 days

a differentiable NEURON in jax, with GPU acceleration. what else is there to say? literally a comp neuro nerd dream come true.

Machine Learning in Science

@mackelab

13 days

How can we train biophysical neuron models on data or tasks? We built Jaxley, a differentiable, GPU-based biophysics simulator, which makes this possible even when models have thousands of parameters! Led by @deismic_ , collab with @CellTypist @ppjgoncalves

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

Finally, we (scientists) tend to blame the media a lot for misrepresentation - I think this is certainly valid here with how some of that is written. But this is a good example of the scientist stretching the science for shock value and I'm certainly not happy about it. 10/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

Personally, I think the diff schools of thought on cognition - especially embodiment and dynamics, in addition to info-processing - are valuable in advancing not only "cognitive science", but neuroscience and AI. Has that been your experience, as a cognitive scientist, as well?

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

9 months

2024 will be the year of the race between #AI4Neuro taking off, and Twitter finally and permanently exploding. You heard it here first. Part 1

Beyond #NeuroAI, we need #AI4Neuro—and we’re going to suck at it (at first). [Part 1]

Are NeuroAI and AI4Neuro the new Computational Neuroscience and Computational Neuroscience?

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day 2 of @neuromatch . starlog > *narrator* : it did not get easier. 8 hours on zoom: philosophy of computational modeling while wrangling visual+vestibular input integration, then brainstorming potential projects. we didn't get through it all. but we got through a fuckton 🎉🧠

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

raw, unfiltered, director's cut on how the 3rd paper in my PhD materialized my mom said these were way too f-ing long and my German mom ( @nschawor ) said I need to blog more so here's part 1/3 aka why am I so pedantic

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day 1 of @neuromatch TAing is done?! holy smokes that was a looong zoom day but the next 3 weeks are gonna be 🔥🔥🔥 cuz my pod already started debating about causality, evolutionary forces, and deep nets for modeling the brain, among a few other small topics

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

"variational inference"

Mathieu Alain

@miniapeur

3 years

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

I learned a LOT from being a TA, arguably more than from being a student, and I got paid so... highly recommend ;)

Neuromatch

@neuromatch

3 years

Sign up as student or TA - deadline May 7. Learn computational neuroscience or Deep Learning. 3 weeks (July 5-23 or Aug 2-20). Beautiful materials. Small group setting with great (and paid) TAs. Every timezone. Many languages. Great community.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day 4: I'm learning so much I think I should be paying @neuromatch to TA this course. also: OLS, GLM, MLE, cross val, bootstrap, regularization, and a project proposal on a concrete question... no offense to data scientists but I think there are 1800 more of you for hire now

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

You're not gonna believe me, but the most incredible thing is not that I got through #SfN2019 alive, but that I didn't have a single sip of coffee the entire time I was in Chicago. Some reflections:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

There is a lot of data in the short paper so check it out, but in summary: we find that what's "CogSci" is predominantly Psychology, both by who publishes in CogSci and which journals cite/are cited by CogSci.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

@yael_niv @ashleyruba so if you're not justifying the low pay, what exactly is the intent of your reply? That good training/mentorship and good pay are non-mutually exclusive? Indeed, that exists in industry. Are you saying good mentorship in academia warrants taking a 50% paycut from market rate?

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

why is it that the RNN folks in comp neuro make especially accessible tutorials that guide entry into research-level material? are there similar examples in any other subfields of comp neuro / ML?

Tutorial: Recurrent neural networks for cognitive neuroscience

Robert Guangyu Yang, MITIn this hands-on tutorial, we will work together through a number of coding exercises to see how RNNs can be easily used to study cog...

www.youtube.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

@jsnsndr @jpeelle @ShanskyLab 16 & 22: "how to tell spot a computational neuroscientist in 1 picture"

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

real testimonial for day 5 of @neuromatch on PCA: "today was fun!" oh the pure joy of seeing MNIST latent space 🥲🎉📊 also they got this beautiful thing happening. this is an accurate representation of my brain after one week

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

me when I was 18: "like...I'm already pretty tolerant about learning useless math but when the f is Taylor series going to help me in life, EVER?" me on day 12 of @neuromatch : "ball is life? more like linearizing dynamical systems is life."

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day 8 of @neuromatch : HMM & Kalman filter. im ded. but I'm really loving these conceptual visualization slides (e.g., for HMM & GLM) where you can swap component functions and distributions in and out to make different models. compneuro-legoland!

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

1 year

oh hey it's are-LFPs-and-electric-fields-causal? o'clock on twitter again!

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

timescales are everywhere and everywhen(???) so we are stoked to have such a wide range of expertise on this topic for the workshop, across methods, organisms, and...scales personally i'm looking forward to the scale vs. scalefree perspectives (hopefully debate) also, beach

Roxana Zeraati

@roxana_zeraati

3 years

Really looking forward to our workshop organized together with @_rdgao on "Mechanisms, functions, and methods for diversity of neuronal and network timescales" @CosyneMeeting , here is a tentative schedule:

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

*open twitter* *close twitter*

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

look at this beautiful oscillation...great peak:trough asymmetry and phase-amplitude coupling (data collected from SF)

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

damn look what y'all did

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day final of @neuromatch : 80+ hours of zoom later, I can't believe it's over. I'm gonna miss these ponies next week. it has been so incredibly inspiring and intense for the last 3 weeks that things felt...normal. raincheck on the end of summer school beers but it'll be on me.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

We ARE working on neurotypical organoids and we have found oscillatory activity in the network. This is true, and we are super excited about this (or, I think am, not sure if @bradleyvoytek still wants anything to do with this after this publicity stunt). Preprint pending! 5/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

But I decided to write this anyway because I think we have a responsibility to fix shitty "news" articles (no surprise it's in @sciencemagazine ), especially when pertaining to our own stuff, ESPECIALLY if it's actually genuinely cool stuff misrepresented (by media and PI) !! end/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

I don't know who needs to hear this but F U MATLAB

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

I'm not working with the "Neaderoids" (..wtf guys). But as written in the article, it's just 1 gene swapped out with CRISPR. Again, I don't know why he would say "creating Neanderthal mind", but the lab is composed of biologists, not cognitive scientists. So please excuse him. 3/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

goodbye cruel world

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

We're NOT (yet) wiring the organoids to crab robots. The robot is a distant goal following a series of planned experiments with open-loop, close-loop, and finally, embodied feedback stimulation to the organoid, since we now see real oscillatory network activity in them. 6/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

look ma no hands

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

I'm gonna be burned at the stake for this but I've been having this nagging feeling for a long time now that action potentials in neurons are not "designed for communication", whatever that means.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

me, for 3 days every february

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

me: look I really think this cosyne submission is going nowhere. I feel like I'm just spinning in circles... my code: hold my beer.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

3 years

one of the most valuable and unintuitive thing I learned in science is that good people—formal mentors, colleagues, or people in the community (like Patrick)—amplify one's opportunities and knowledge exponentially

Patrick Mineault

@patrickmineault

3 years

I often meet with grad students and postdocs interested in industry. I tell them how important it is to contact people. Most jobs aren't posted, and most people are nice. However, students often push back, thinking networking is transactional and a bit icky 1/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

"how's week 1 going?" oh you know just spending 4 hours trying to make a brain omelet wtf even is this

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

1 month

I'm stuck in some kind of weird nerd Groundhog Day scenario where I Google a new thing and find out it's all computations and always has been. (yes the meme is in there, obviously)

Beyond #NeuroAI, we need #AI4Neuro—and we’re going to suck at it (at first). [Part 2]

For starters, I sort of assumed NeuroAI was, well, the intersection of neuroscience and AI. I think that’s pretty reasonable? And while that’s technically true, you will see in a bit that it’s a...

www.rdgao.com

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day 14 of @neuromatch , comp neuro in one sentence: "dot products and nonlinearity with some stochasticity, maybe evolving over time, fit to a loss function with optimization..." "wait isn't that just machine lear—" "... oh and that's how the brain does it."

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

4 years

day 11 of @neuromatch : LIF and *whisper* E/I balanced spiking neural networks, synaptic plasticity models... whew, I feel like I know stuff again, finally

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

6 years

IDK why they made a point to say "robots resemble crabs". It's just a hobbyist robot that one of the students (who is, get this, a high school freshman) bought online that has more sophisticated servo motors. It's actually turning out to be a pain in the ass with so many legs. 8/

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

I know this is serious but I can't stop lol-ing at UCSD trending because of the coronavirus shutdown... ...and the imminent mass realization that physical universities in the 21st century is a literal scam that can be replaced by MOOCs in two weeks.

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

1 year

eagerly waiting for "human brain is actually gzip" nature 2024 paper

Luke Gessler

@LukeGessler

1 year

this paper's nuts. for sentence classification on out-of-domain datasets, all neural (Transformer or not) approaches lose to good old kNN on representations generated by.... gzip

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

5 years

as I relearn a bunch of math things in grad school that is finally applicable to (my) real life, one thought repeatedly pops into my head: how the f did they ever let me graduate from college?

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Richard Gao

@_rdgao

2 years

no fake blue check but board YY2 tomorrow in the dreaded Wed afternoon session: fitting AdExIF spiking neural networks to neural population data to infer underlying circuit parameters - reduce graduate student pain of manual parameter search! with @deismic_ and @jakhmack

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