Sign in

Alexander Ecker

@aecker.bsky.social
438 followers 380 following 31 posts

Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Computer Vision • Scientist at @unigoettingen.bsky.social & MPI-DS • eckerlab.org • Co-founder of maddox.ai • Dad of three • All things outdoor

PostsRepliesMedia
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Thanks to our special guests @stes.io and Marissa Weis for the cool talks and great discussions!
000
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Had a great time with the team at our workshop at Schneefernerhaus on the Zugspitze last week! Great science and team discussions including three new people, alumni and special guests. Thanks everyone!
Sunrise on Zugspitze - Höllental and JubiläumsgratEarly morning hikers at the Zugsitze peakHike towards KnorrhütteTeam photo at Schneefernerhaus at 2650 m above sea level
180
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Thomas Zenkel @thomaszen.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
📣 Our paper introducing openretina, a collaborative framework for retina modelling across datasets and species, is now published as an eLife Reviewed Preprint. Paper: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... Code: github.com/open-retina/... Docs: open-retina.org
12911
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Timo Lüddecke @timojl.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
🚀 Introducing LiDeRe: a lightweight readout that turns frozen vision backbones (e.g. DINOv3) into strong dense predictors. A tiny head → semantic segmentation, detection, pose, contour. Often beats SoTA methods with a fraction of the trainable parameters. At #CVPR2026, poster session 1 on Friday.
LiDeRe summary figure
111
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
A nice and fun small workshop on NeuroAI. Looking forward to it!
010
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Fabian Sinz @sinzlab.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
🧠Introducing OmniMouse: One of the largest datasets in neuroscience along with a systematic study of scaling properties of brain models Co-led by 🤩 K. Willeke, @pollytur.bsky.social and @alexrgil14.bsky.social Models trained on up to 3M neurons, >150B tokens
14326
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Fabian Sinz @sinzlab.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
🚀 OmniMouse is at ICLR: Poster: Friday, April 24, 3:15PM, P3-#1808 📄 Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=mEw4lhAn0F 📝 Blog: tinyurl.com/7bjyrhk8 📊 Data: tinyurl.com/2txa9b6t 💻 Code: github.com/enigma-brain/omnimouse 🤗 Model: hf.co/the-enigma-project/omnimouse 🤗 Data: tinyurl.com/bp685dv9
142
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Fabian Sinz @sinzlab.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Early career researcher: Are you thinking about writing an ERC , Emmy Noether Proposal, or Lower Saxony AI Group application, and are you interested to work with us at @uni-goettingen.de and @goettingen-campus.de
uni-goettingen.de
Information Event on Funding Programs - Georg-August-University Göttingen
Website of the Georg-August-University Göttingen
174
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
If you recently finished your PhD in ML for life science and are looking for a new job early next year, please apply! Göttingen is a lovely town and a great scientific environment.
033
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Probably not. Last month the convention center hosted the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, which regularly attracts more than 30,000 attendees sfn2025.org
sfn2025.org
SFN 2025 || Society for Neuroscience
SFN is home to host the much-awaited 23rd SFN Annual World Congress in Paris, IN PERSON.
000
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
🛫 On my way to San Diego for #NeurIPS. Touch base if you want to meet up and chat about neuroAI, postdoc opportunities in Germany or just hang out!
020
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Timo Lüddecke @timojl.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
📣 Paper alert: We present dense attentive probing (DeAP), a method to measure the representation quality of various vision backbones for dense prediction tasks. It uses small, parameter-efficient readouts with learnable masks to generate dense predictions from backbone features of any size.
152
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
pollytur.bsky.social @pollytur.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
I‘m at NeurIPS Mexico and happy to chat about comp neuro, video understanding, multimodal and foundational models If you are in San Diego - check out our posters together with Nina, Finn, Chase and more members of @aecker.bsky.social and @sinzlab.bsky.social More about the papers in the thread ⬇️
131
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Fabian Sinz @sinzlab.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
🔬 Exciting PostDoc Opportunity! 🐁🧠 We - the @sinzlab.bsky.social (sinzlab.org) and @trose-neuro.bsky.social (troselab.de) Labs - are seeking an experimental postdoc to work at @unibonn.bsky.social with cutting-edge miniature 2-photon microscopy and gaze tracking in freely behaving mice.
2166
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
Deadline for applying with us at #ELLISPhD program is in 10 days (Oct 31). We're looking for highly motivated people working at the interface of machine learning and neuroscience.
082
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
If you're interested in doing your PhD with us, please apply via the ELLIS PhD program! We're looking for talented people interested in the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience.
031
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
Touch base with me if you have any questions. I’m happy to chat!
010
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
🎯 Göttingen is a small university town (around 120k people) and very family friendly. Everything within the city can be reached by bike within 15 min.
100
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
🌍 Göttingen is located in the center of Germany and Europe, in a region known for its green hills, lovely small towns with half-timbered houses and the Harz Mountains. Well-connected through motorways and high-speed trains.
100
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
🎓The @goettingen-campus.de is highly collaborative, has a great variety of data-intensive research in natural and life sciences, social science and humanities, including top-notch places like @mpi-nat.bsky.social, @mpsgoettingen.bsky.social, MPI-DS, @primatenzentrum.bsky.social, @dlr-en.bsky.social
100
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
The position is embedded in the recently founded Lower Saxony Center for AI and Causal Methods in Medicine (CAIMed) caimed.de/en/ as well as the Campus Institute Data Science (CIDAS), Göttingen.
caimed.de
Home - CAIMed - Niedersächsisches Zentrum für KI und Kausale Methoden in der Medizin
CAIMed is the Lower Saxony research center for artificial intelligence and causal methods in medicine. We develop innovative methods for improved, personalized healthcare and contribute to the managem...
100
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
💡It's a deliberately broad call. Areas of interest include: RL; VR, AR & digital avatars; Embodied AI, NLP; HCI; Causal models; Time series models; Multimodal data integration; Image analysis and CV; Computational and simulation science; Visualization; HPC and Energy-efficient AI.
100
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
📢 We have an opening for a tenure track assistant professor position (W1 t.t. W2) in AI in our CS dept @uni-goettingen.de, Germany. ⏰ Application deadline: Sept 19 🗣️ Please share! uni-goettingen.de/en/697924.html
uni-goettingen.de
W1-TT-W2 Artificial Intelligence - Georg-August-University Göttingen
Website of the Georg-August-University Göttingen
174
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Kaja Wierucka @kajawierucka.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
📢 Fully-funded PhD opportunity! Explore the links between social & communication networks in ring-tailed lemurs! Exciting fieldwork, interdisciplinary team, and innovative technologies! Apply now and join @primatenzentrum.bsky.social & @unigoettingen.bsky.social for this cutting-edge research!
23939
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
In Lurz et al., ICLR 2021 we did quite some analysis on scaling and generalization across animals in the context of visual response prediction (incl. behavioral modulation) with @sinzlab.bsky.social and @andreastolias.bsky.social: openreview.net/forum?id=Tp7...
openreview.net
Generalization in data-driven models of primary visual cortex
Deep neural networks (DNN) have set new standards at predicting responses of neural populations to visual input. Most such DNNs consist of a convolutional network (core) shared across all neurons...
181
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
Nature Methods @natmethods.nature.com · 14/04/2025
A Perspective from the Ecker lab discusses the progress and challenges of using computer vision approaches for behavior studies of primates in natural environments. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
0123
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
...and of course – shame on me for the oversight – the great @philipp.hertie.ai
010
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Thanks to co-authors Marissa Weis, Stelios Papadopoulos, @lhansel.bsky.social, Timo Lüddecke, Brendan Celii, Paul Fahey, Nuno da Costa, Forrest Collman, @csdashm.com , @clayreid.bsky.social, @sebastianseung.bsky.social, @viajake.bsky.social & Andreas Tolias. Funding: @erc.europa.eu & IARPA (12/12)
ky.social
140
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
It's been great fun to be part of the MICrONS consortium. (11/12) bsky.app/profile/alle...
110
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Using the power of the MICrONS dataset, we could show that our functional digital twin of the neurons could predict the basal bias of cells in lower layer 4 without this model having access to any morphological information. (10/12) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
110
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
We found a novel morphological trait in layer 4: neurons that are primarily located in V1 in a narrow stripe around the L4-L5 boundary. These neurons are atufted and avoid reaching into L5 with their basal dendrites. (9/12)
110
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
There morphological differences between primary visual cortex (V1) and higher visual areas (HVA): In layer 4, atufted neurons are primarily located in V1, while tufted neurons are more abundant in areas AL and RL. (8/12)
120
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Neurons in layer 2/3 show strong trends with increasing cortical depth: (1) decreasing width of their dendritic arbor and (2) smaller tufts. (7/12)
150
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Dendritic morphologies vary with respect to three major axes: (1) the soma depth, (2) the total skeletal length of the apical dendrites and (3) the total skeletal length of the basal dendrites. (6/12)
120
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Dendritic morphologies form mostly a continuum, with distinct clusters only in deeper layers (e.g. layer 5 ET neurons). A quantitative test using synthethic surrogate data suggested that from layer 2 throughout upper layer 5 no density gaps exist and dendritic morphologies change continuously (5/12)
120
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Our learned embeddings capture the essence of the 3D morphology of neurons and reflect known excitatory cell types from mouse V1. (4/12)
110
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
We employed GraphDINO, a self-supervised method for learning representations of neuronal morphologies without relying on manual annotations. The model outputs a vector embedding for each neuron that captures the morphological features of its dendritic tree. (3/12)
110
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
The data underlying our analysis is from the MICrONS consortium: a ~1mm³ volume of tissue from the mouse visual cortex, densely reconstructed using serial section electron microscopy, segmented into more than 54,000 individual neurons, among them ~30,000 excitatory ones. (2/12)
130
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
📣 Now out in Nature Communications as part of the MICrONS package: Our study on excitatory morphological cell types in mouse visual cortex led by Marissa Weis. We describe a set of principles that capture the morphological diversity excitatory neurons. A thread: (1/12) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
An unsupervised map of excitatory neuron dendritic morphology in the mouse visual cortex - Nature Communications
Excitatory neurons in the neocortex exhibit considerable morphological diversity, yet their organizational principles remain a subject of ongoing research. Here, the authors use unsupervised learning ...
14118
Reposted by Alexander Ecker
SFB 1528 - Cognition of Interaction @sfb1528.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
SFB Paper Alert! That’s teamwork: 14 SFB members across nine projects put together a perspective paper on “Computer vision for primate behavior analysis in the wild”, which was published in @naturemethods.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Computer vision for primate behavior analysis in the wild - Nature Methods
In this Perspective, Vogg et al. discuss the progress and challenges of using computer vision approaches in the behavioral analysis of primates in their natural environment.
11012
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Looking forward to working with you, @hroetschke.bsky.social and @juliastachowiak.bsky.social!
070
Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Hello, world! I’m moving here from the X sphere, hoping to find a nicer environment 🙂
2271