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The Good Research Code Handbook
When I was in grad school, I wrote a lot of code which ended up biting me later. It wasn’t until I got a job as a software engineer at Google that I discovered better ways of organizing code. Writing reusable, easy-to-read code is a core skill to have when you’re spending half of your…
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Dimensionality reduction in neural data analysis
It’s become commonplace to record from hundreds of neurons simultaneously. If past trends extrapolate, we might commonly record 10k neurons by 2030. What are we going to do with all this data? To deal with a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3D space and say fourteen to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it. Geoffrey Hinton Neural…
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My stack for research ML projects
For the past few months, I’ve been working on a machine learning research project, which I just submitted to NeurIPS [update: it was accepted as a spotlight! Preprint here]. The scale is, all things considered, fairly small: the output limited to one paper and a handful of figures. Yet, I still needed to distribute the…
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Dynamic scientific visualizations in the browser for Python users
As a scientist, interacting with data allows you to gain new insight into the phenomena you’re studying. If you read the New York Times, the D3 docs or you browse distill, you’ll see impressive browser-based visualizations – interactive storytelling that not only accurately represent data but bring your attention to surprising aspects of it. Making…
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Accelerating progress in brain recording tech
In Stevenson and Kording (2011), the authors estimated that every 7.4 years, the number of neurons we can record with doubles. Think of it as Moore’s law for brain recordings. Since then, Stevenson has updated the estimate, which now stands at 6 years. Could it be that progress itself is accelerating? Matteo Carandini raised a…
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Is early vision like a convolutional neural net?
Early convolutional neural net (CNNs) architectures like the Neocognitron, LeNet and HMAX were inspired by the brain. But how much like the brain are modern CNNs? I made a pretty strong claim on Twitter a few weeks ago that the early visual processing is nothing like a CNN: In typical Twitter fashion, my statement was…
xcorr: AI & neuro 