@kristinmbranson@social.coop
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

kristinmbranson

@kristinmbranson@social.coop

I'm a science researcher passionate about #MachineLearning, #ComputerVision, #Ethology, #Neuroscience, #ML4Science, #InclusiveScience, and #DEI.
I'm a Senior Group Leader at #HHMIJanelia.
Previously was a postdoc at #Caltech, PhD at #UCSD CSE, Bachelors at #Harvard CS, originally from San Diego.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Aging in computer science is hard, in that the current thing changes so often, so the current thing is like my second (or maybe sixth?) language , if that analogy makes sense. Still, sometimes I know the answers to the questions people in my lab have because I've been doing this for quite a while and have tried lots of things and learned from lots of mistakes. It makes me feel so useful!

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

I have a little jumping spider living in my office. Sometimes he says hello!

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@albertcardona Oh interesting!!! This is one of the questions I have about flies, can they visually recognize each other. There was a visual connectome modeling paper a while back showing that it was theoretically possible, and I wonder about the role of individual recognition in general in fly social behavior.

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@albertcardona Yeah, I think it's possible, particularly in combination with chemosensory cues, but unclear, as with the jumping spiders, whether/when/how it is useful. Thanks for the link!!

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@debivort @albertcardona Thanks!! Very interesting!! Do you have an intuition as to whether the flies might be using the physical appearance of the other fly vs other visually available properties, e.g. the movements of the other fly? Have you thought about doing a "playback" experiment, where on day n > 1 you project a (possibly modified) video of the second fly on the barrier? I'm thinking it could be an interesting way to separate out visual appearance vs movement/closed-loop interaction.

jni, to random
@jni@fosstodon.org avatar

โ€œI havenโ€™t been bitten by Google killing an app or service since Google Reader, because I never again trusted them.โ€

๐Ÿ‘† this.

(Also note: I am aware of Gruberโ€™s terrible takes on the EU, and Threads, and a bunch of other stuff. But on this he is spot on. The Google Graveyard is so damaging to Googleโ€™s brand, itโ€™s astonishing to me that (a) anyone still uses Google products, and (b) the execs still kill stuff rather than keeping it on life support just for reputation.)
https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/112204358739653554

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@jni I'm afraid to lose Google Scholar.

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

I'm really hoping you don't need me to tell you that using machine learning ("AI") systems to identify potential targets and then to suggest that they be targeted when at home with their family members, including children, is one of the most abhorrent, unethical, inhumane things I've ever seen. There is absolutely no excuse for developing these systems. Technology is never neutral. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@CatherineFlick Everything in this article is so terrible.

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

We had a presentation at Janelia today about Florence Bell, a crystallographer who took an X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA in 1938, about 10 years before Rosalind Franklin's, and was also an important source for Watson & Crick's DNA model. Here's a really nice article about Florence Bell from Kersten Hall:
Florence Bellโ€”the โ€˜Housewifeโ€™ with x-ray vision
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0064

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Absolutely beautiful work from Stephen Huston and coauthors finally published yesterday:
"Motor neurons generate pose-targeted movements via proprioceptive sculpting"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07222-5
Motor control is really complicated and so so interesting. This work embraces that complexity to dissect control of a fly's neck with pretty unexpected but clear results. Rather than each motor neuron encoding a single movement direction, the direction of movement depends on the pose of the head. 1/n

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

New work from a collaboration between several labs at Janelia and Deepmind, in which we built an anatomically-detailed, biomechanical model of a fly in the physics simulator Mujoco, then used reinforcement and imitation learning to train it to walk and fly like a fly. I'm excited to work to figure out how this can help us understand motor control, sensory integration, and embodied cognition.
Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.11.584515v1
News story: https://www.janelia.org/news/artificial-intelligence-brings-a-virtual-fly-to-life

Video showing the fly model in an exploded view.

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Janelia's 4D Cellular Physiology Conference is streaming now, anyone can register to watch.
https://www.janelia.org/you-janelia/conferences/4d-cellular-physiology

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Skimming through this well-written paper, "MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP architecture for Vision", 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01601.
I appreciate two non-standard sections:
Appendix A: "Things that did not help"
Appendix E: "MLP-Mixer code" - simple jax code of the network so you don't have to decipher this from imprecise language, or search their much more complex code base.
1/2

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

TIL the unicorn origami from Blade Runner requires cutting and taping and is made from two squares! Purple is the Blade Runner unicorn, pink is based on Jo Nakashima's model and is more kosher. Tutorials here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXRjOW_FMFM
https://jonakashima.com.br/2019/11/25/origami-unicorn/

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

This kea tried to unzip my backpack -- endangered, super intelligent alpine parrot. I was happy to read that it's not that people feed them, but they just really like to explore new things and are very bold. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/410887/study-on-kea-notes-unprecedented-smart-behaviour

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

I'm not sure how much letters of recommendation inform me about the recommendee, but they definitely inform me about the recommender.

albertcardona, to android
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Public service announcement

Here's how to disable background apps in an Android phone:

  1. Go to Settings
  2. Search for "Developer Options"
  3. Enable them at top right
  4. Scroll down to "Background process limit"
  5. Choose "No background process" or "At most, 1 process".

Further down, see also "Standby apps" and adjust their priority as wished. Most should be at rare, restricted, or never.

With these edits, even inexpensive, underpowered phones feel snappy. Helps as well to remove altogether any "smart" assistance apps by Samsung.

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@albertcardona Goodness, how do you get to Developer Options on a Samsung phone? Go to About phone -> Software information and then tap the Build number 7 times! Clearly something they want you to do ...
https://thedroidguy.com/how-to-enable-developer-options-on-galaxy-s22-developer-mode-1166460

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

have to give a talk i'm super nervous about in 1.5 hours. how do i keep myself busy until then when my brain doesn't seem to work?

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Just getting a chance now to look at @strawman 's new system for following and keeping in focus flying insects with a telescope, including from a drone. The videos are amazing. There's surprisingly limited video of insects flying with the spatiotemporal resolution to track and analyze their wing and body movements.
Andrew's post on this work:
https://social.coop/@strawman@sciencemastodon.com/111624685212157804
Paper on bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.20.572558v1
Check out the videos in the supplement there, sneak peak gif:

Video of a bumblebee taking off from a flower

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Most decisions in life have some pros and cons. Not silencing your microwave. There is no downside
https://www.wikihow.com/Silence-a-Microwave

DAIR, to random
@DAIR@dair-community.social avatar

We are alarmed by this. Many people use dropbox for highly sensitive communication.

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@DAIR FWIW one of my Dropbox accounts (my personal one) had the setting (and it was enabled by default) and one of them did not (my work one). Don't know what that means.

Screenshot of the Dropbox settings without the Third-Party AI sharing option.

philiphubbard, to Neuroscience
@philiphubbard@fediscience.org avatar

The neuVid system for / videos now supports . Given natural language, it makes a video with (). E.g.:

"Frame on neuron 393766777 from the Janelia hemibrain. Orbit the camera 45 degrees over 6 seconds, and move in 25% while orbiting. 1 second in, fade on neuron 1196854070 over 1 second. Then fade on the output synapses of 393766777 connecting to 1196854070 taking 1 second. Synapses should be extra big."

https://github.com/connectome-neuprint/neuVid

(1/3)

A video of two neurons from the Janelia FlyEM hemibrain data set and the synapses connecting them.

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@philiphubbard Super cool! Congrats!!

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

My biologist colleagues keep using the term physiological and I am struggling to understand its precise meaning. Can anyone explain to a computer scientist what it means specifically? Wikipedia says it is " the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system" which seems like a lot of things.

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Does anyone know why eLife "reviewed preprints" don't have a downloadable pdf? Example:
https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/87340
@eLife

Screencap of an article with a Download button.

NicoleCRust, (edited ) to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Looking for: complex systems that defy model reduction.

The behavior of a complex system is hard to predict from its parts alone because it follows from how the parts interact.

Model reduction is a way to capture the behavior of a complex system more simply (eg to capture the magnetism of 1g of Fe2O3, you don't have to model all 1022 molecules and their interactions). My sense is that model reduction works best when you have many repeated copies.

I'm looking for some good (ideally concrete) examples of complex systems that defy model reduction. I anticipate that they will be made of heterogeneous parts.

Thanks in advance!

#complexity

kristinmbranson,
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

@NicoleCRust What do you think about artificial deep neural networks? There have been many attempts to try to decompose these into pieces, but, particularly deeper layers seem to have "entangled" a lot of concepts that are intuitive to humans. Maybe we just need to work harder to understand how to reduce them, so it is a bit of an unknown, e.g. this work
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2021/framework/index.html
Parts are quite homogeneous in architecture, but heterogeneous in learned weights.

kristinmbranson, to random
@kristinmbranson@social.coop avatar

Impressed that this beetle could lift the rock in this video. The internet tells me that dung beetles can lift 1141x their weight.
Link to video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1nf8T6XjiJ6iAvgD8

Mug next to rock for scale.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • โ€ข
  • provamag3
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ethstaker
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • ngwrru68w68
  • Youngstown
  • everett
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • khanakhh
  • GTA5RPClips
  • PowerRangers
  • anitta
  • thenastyranch
  • Durango
  • cubers
  • tester
  • vwfavf
  • mdbf
  • cisconetworking
  • tacticalgear
  • modclub
  • normalnudes
  • osvaldo12
  • Leos
  • megavids
  • All magazines
    •