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Kristin Branson

@kristinmbranson.bsky.social
1.3K followers 400 following 137 posts

Researcher in machine learning and computer vision for science. Senior Group Leader at HHMI Janelia Research Campus. Supporter of DEIB in science and tech. CV: bit.ly/BransonCV

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Reposted by Kristin Branson
Serge Belongie @serge.belongie.com · 01/10/2026
It’s ELLIS PhD application season! 🎓 @belongielab.org has openings in CV/ML; fine-grained analysis of multimodal data; generative models for images and video; narrative analysis and misinformation detection, self-supervised learning; human-in-the-loop computing. Due date: 31-Oct-2026 🎃
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
I have no solutions; I present only problems. These problems are societal that cannot be solved with technology. Meanwhile the framing of the debate means no one can stop, even if one believes in the destructive power of ASI (artificial super intelligence). Anyway, have a great day.
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Ann Kennedy @antihebbiann.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
We're super excited to use these models to understand how shifts in neuronal physiology, for example induced by neuromodulators and neuropeptides, can give rise to changes in population dynamics. Stay tuned for follow-up work in the coming weeks! arxiv.org/abs/2607.09516
arxiv.org
A multi-ensemble mean-field reduction method for networks of globally coupled phase oscillators with arbitrary parameter distributions
Understanding the dynamical properties of coupled phase oscillator systems with heterogeneous oscillator frequencies has been a long-standing challenge of complex systems theory. While the seminal wor...
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Jan M. Ache @jan-ache.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
This paper is now published in its final (and much improved) form in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Huge thanks to @sanderliessem.bsky.social, Stefan Dahlhoff, all our co-authors & our collaborators in the @postpop.bsky.social and Büschges labs.
kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me
Control of walking direction by descending and dopaminergic neurons in Drosophila
Animals fine-control the speed and direction of locomotion to navigate complex and dynamic environments. To achieve this, they integrate multimodal se…
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Good news! Our paper evaluating agentic AI for computational neuroscience tasks was accepted to COLM (Conference on Language Modeling)! colmweb.org/index.html This work was led by Kai Horstmann, a talented PhD student, and done in collaboration with Jennifer Sun's group at Cornell.
colmweb.org
COLM 2026
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ExplainableML @eml-munich.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Happy to share that we have 8 papers accepted to #ICML2026! 🎉 Most of the authors will be traveling to Seoul, Korea 🇰🇷 — feel free to reach out and chat with them if you’re interested in the work. See the full thread below for our papers 👇
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Bella Fascendini @bellafascendini.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
I read the two part version when it came out — it was very accessible, well-written, and gave me a better understanding of issues around LLMs ⬇️
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Ann Kennedy @antihebbiann.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Braitenberg Vehicle day with Hugo Marques at QABVR: wire light, touch, and distance sensors to a pair of motors, then tune the sensor gains and motor outputs to play follow the leader
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Laura Driscoll @lndriscoll.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
New job posting! If you're interested in working with our group, check it out. 3 year position (with possibility to extend) at >100k. alleninstitute.org/careers/jobs...
alleninstitute.org
Open Positions | Allen Institute
Build your career at the Allen Institute. Explore current job openings and find your place in a team driving some of the most ambitious open science in the world.
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Agentic coding is genuinely useful now, and there are some impressive reports of AI agents doing science. But how well and how reliably can they handle tasks scientists actually want to hand off, ones that bottleneck progress? How do we even measure that?? New paper🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2606.07718 1/10
arxiv.org
A case study of evaluating AI agents on a neuroscience data-to-discovery pipeline
Agentic AI tools offer a promising path to automating software development bottlenecks in scientific research pipelines, particularly for stages that take domain experts days to months to build, where...
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
This is pretty crazy, Fable will silently harm (am I understanding that right?) ML research "building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design" jonready.com/blog/posts/c...
jonready.com
If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know — Jonathon Ready
Anthropic's Claude Fable policy turns coding assistants into non-neutral infrastructure for product companies.
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Bummer for those of us doing AI for science :(. Claude Fable 5 filters are very broad. Hopefully they'll be refined some! @anthropic.com
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Serge Belongie @serge.belongie.com · 20/05/2026
Fine Grained Analysis 🤝 Robotic Manipulation Evaluation MetaFine, developed in collaboration with Xiu-Shen Wei and team, provides a diagnostic meta-evaluation framework for fine-grained robotic manipulation. (1/4)
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ExplainableML @eml-munich.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Happy to share that we have 3 papers accepted (one oral) at #CVPR2026, see you in Denver! Please see the thread for details👇
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10
Overview of the data conversion task. The benchmark includes eight datasets spanning a range of neural recording modalities, behavioral tasks, measurements, experiment protocols, and data formats. For each dataset, agents were also given the released paper, methods, and code, together with a structured prompt. The agent’s goal was to convert each heterogeneous source dataset into a common format suitable for a neural decoding task. 
Diagram has a column for each of 8 papers from mouse systems neuroscience. The first row shows the name of the dataset and a description of the focus of that work: 1) Allen2P: Visual change detection,2) Lee2025: Spatial coding & remapping, 3) Majnik2025: Cortical development, 4) Sosa2024: Spatial reward learning,  5) Chen2024: Memory-guided decision, 6) Hasnain2024: Context-based decision, 7) Zhang2025: Visual-motor decision, 8) Zhong2025: Visual learning. 
The next row shows the type of neural recording data: 1, 3, 4, 8: head-fixed calcium imaging, 2: miniprobe, 5-7: neuropixels or other silicon probes
The next row shows the types of behavioral and task variables. These are different for every task
The next row shows a visualization of the experiment protocol for each task. Again, these are different for every task
The next row shows that this information is all condensed into data, paper, and code. Data has the different types of information in different orders and structures. It also shows the type of files: 1: NWB files & SDK, 2,6: MATLAB files, 3, 7: Python files, 4-5: NWB files, 8: Various + API
The next part of the diagram shows the task, which is for agents to convert the data to a common data format for a downstream decoder task.
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Lindia Tjuatja @lindiatjuatja.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
When it comes to text prediction, where does one LM outperform another? If you've ever worked on LM evals, you know this question is a lot more complex than it seems. In our new #acl2025 paper, we developed a method to find fine-grained differences between LMs: 🧵1/9
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Janelia Research Campus @hhmijanelia.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
🪰 A new ‘Eyemap’ developed by a team led by Arthur Zhao & @michaelreiser.bsky.social reveals how visual information detected by the fly’s eye shows up in neurons deep in the brain. Remarkably, the eye’s shape determines how flies see motion.👁️ 🔗 hhmi.news/4kSZjou
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
TIL when upgrading your Ubuntu OS, sometimes it will just hang and not tell you what's going on. The solution is just to hold down the Enter key until it starts going again: www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/curren...
kubuntuforums.net
Upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04 hangs; terminal not interactive - Kubuntu Forums
I got tired of always ignoring the popups saying I needed to upgrade 20.04 (my Fossa was now a fossil...) so I clicked on the Upgrade button in the popup itself, which gave me some kind of terminal wi...
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Andrew Gordon Wilson @andrewgwils.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
Excited to be presenting my paper "Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different" tomorrow at ICML, 11 am - 1:30 pm, East Exhibition Hall A-B, E-500. I made a little video overview as part of the ICML process (viewable from Chrome): recorder-v3.slideslive.com#/share?share...
recorder-v3.slideslive.com
SlidesLive Recorder
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Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
I recently participated in the High-Level Expert Panel on AGI, convened by the Council of Presidents of the UN General Assembly, which has just released its final report on the Governance of the Transition to AGI. Report below ⬇️ uncpga.world/agi-uncpga-r...
uncpga.world
AGI UNCPGA Report | Council of Presidents of the United Nations General Assembly
AGI UNCPGA Report
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
cute little label at the bottom of a climb that i thought applies to lots of things, including this "5.9"
Tag on a rock that says "Mental as Anything" and has an icon of a brain
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
Had fun slotting together my new Framework 13 laptop! Look how cute my purple USB port is!
Purple USB C port
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
I'd really like someone to get AI to solve package management for me. (I convinced myself to try to learn pixi this week and it has not solved all my problems.)
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FGVC Workshop @fgvcworkshop.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
BirdCLEF25: Audio-based species identification focused on birds, amphibians, mammals, and insects in Colombia. 👉 www.kaggle.com/competitions... @cvprconference.bsky.social @kaggle.com #FGVC #CVPR #CVPR2025 #LifeCLEF [1/4]
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Highly recommend the tutorial notebook by @briandepasquale.bsky.social for a good intro to GNNs and also working with Drosophila connectomics data! tinyurl.com/cosyne-gnn-2...
tinyurl.com
Google Colab
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
Flies are exceptionally good at fast and efficient visual motion processing. I'm fascinated by the heuristics/hacks evolution has come up with for processing motion in a moving animal. What can computer vision for robotics or on the edge learn from this?
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Michael Reiser @michaelreiser.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
I know there's a 𝒍𝒐𝒕 going on right now, but I couldn’t be prouder to share this long-incubated labor of love: the complete connectome of the male 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 optic lobe 🧠🪰 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Connectome-driven neural inventory of a complete visual system - Nature
A connectome of the right optic lobe from a male fruitfly is presented together with an extensive collection of genetic drivers matched to a comprehensive neuron-type catalogue.
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
Excited to participate in the Graph Neural Networks workshop at Cosyne on Monday March 31 (day 1): IT’S ALL CONNECTED! Graph approaches to geometric complexity in neuroscience sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo... Hope to see you there!
sites.google.com
gnnworkshop cosyne2025
It's All Connected!
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Liz Neeley @lizneeley.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
Oh I'm very into open science approaches that deploy Jupyter Notebooks. I really like what @arcadiascience.com is doing with their new publication efforts & team - research.arcadiascience.com/pub/perspect...
research.arcadiascience.com
Closing the divide between analysis and publication: The notebook pub
We're experimenting with treating our computational notebooks as publications themselves. This approach reduces publication burden, encourages faster publishing, and builds in reproducibility. Scienti...
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Dr. Allyson Sgro @allysonsgro.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
This piece is evergreen: www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-u...
mcsweeneys.net
A University President Responds to Those Who Have Suggested the School Should Dip Into the Endowment
To the esteemed members of our faculty and staff, As president of this University, there is nothing more important to me than the health and safety...
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Sara Beery @sarameghanbeery.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
Please share broadly to your networks so this can reach its intended audience! And we are also looking for volunteers to help instruct/mentor. Details here: cv4ecology.caltech.edu/ai-upskillin...
cv4ecology.caltech.edu
AI upskilling workshop for former US/state conservation scientists
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Brian DePasquale @briandepasquale.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
@cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop speaker profile 3 is Ashok Litwin-Kumar, of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social! Ashok has been a driving force in connectomics-based modeling.
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Laura Grima @lauragrima.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
Excited to be presenting this work at #cosyne2025 this week - as a poster (session 3, no. 3-017) and as part of the “Reimagining RL in the Brain” workshop organised by Alison Comrie and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social. My first in-person cosyne, so looking forward to it!
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Laura Driscoll @lndriscoll.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
After hearing about the ongoing hotel workers strike at the #COSYNE2025 hotel, I cancelled my reservation and booked a room at a hotel a short 10 minute walk from the meeting. It was easy and I encourage others to do the same! #solidarity montreal.citynews.ca/2025/01/14/q...
montreal.citynews.ca
Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel reopens after temporarily closing during holidays due to labour dispute
The Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal has reopened after temporarily closing due to an ongoing labour dispute. Quebec’s largest hotel made the announcement on Dec. 12 and shut their doors day...
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Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
I'm organizing a "Data for Good Rapid Response Team", i.e. a set of people who can be mobilized to work on short data science projects to help various groups and organizations. Sign up here if this is of interest to you, and please share with others with data science skills.
docs.google.com
Data-for-good rapid response team
I'm collecting people with data science skills who may want to hear about sporadic opportunities to use their skills for good on short projects. Project themes will center on topics I am connected wit...
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
Looking forward to learning all about the newest in graph neural nets at Cosyne next week!
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jp flores (he/him) @jpflores.rbind.io · 19/03/2025
I sat down with Jaida Elcock (@sofishtication.bsky.social), a marine biologist studying basking sharks, and Danny (@ecoevodanny.bsky.social), a coral researcher & HHMI (@hhmi.org) Gilliam Fellow, to talk all things ocean! 🦈🌿🌊 We explored their journeys, research, and more!
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Kim Stachenfeld, PhD @neurokim.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Want to procedurally generate large-scale relational reasoning experiments in natural language, to study human psychology 🧠 or eval LLMs 🤖? We have a tool for you! Our latest #ICLR work on long-context/relational reasoning evaluation for LLMs ReCogLab! github.com/google-deepm... Thread ⬇️
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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Scientists have just cured pancreatic cancer in some patients with personalized mRNA vaccines. Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away. They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
I'm reading up on code generation evaluation, and I appreciate that the paper about APPS starts with the quote feom Steve Jobs, "Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think" arxiv.org/pdf/2105.09938 Amen
arxiv.org
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Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
PSA for people collaborating across countries: daylight savings time started in the US yesterday, but not everywhere else in the world
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Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.net · 10/03/2025
Why did we organize Stand Up for Science? 🧪☀️⬇️ Read more in our Q&A in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social, out today! Link - www.nature.com/articles/s41... @leslie-bern.bsky.social @emmalovesscience.bsky.social @cdelawalla.bsky.social @jpflores.bsky.social @samschuelstein.bsky.social
nature.com
Why we organized ‘Stand Up For Science’ - Nature Human Behaviour
In the USA, the Trump administration has signed executive orders that impose censorship on key areas of scientific research, strip government scientists of their jobs and reduce federal funding for sc...
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Brian DePasquale @briandepasquale.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
Calling all @cosynemeeting.bsky.social attendees! @neurokim.bsky.social, Sam Lewallen and I are organizing a 🔥🔥 workshop on graph approaches to neuroscience, including graph neural networks! For info see sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo...
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Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.net · 07/03/2025
Want to stream our DC event & hear from amazing speakers like Bill Nye, Francis Collins, Atul Gawande, and SO MANY MORE? Join our livestream at www.twitch.tv/standupforsc..., starting at 12 pm! #standupforscience2025
image of the stand up for science logos with "live stream" on it
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Jay Rosen @jayrosen.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
Some of his readers have asked Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social why his technology news site, Tech Dirt, has been covering politics so intensely lately. www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/w... I cannot recommend Mike's reply enough. It's exactly what readers need to hear, what journalists need to do.
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Mathis Riehle @mornorse.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
@virginieuhlmann.bsky.social talked @tlmcambridge.bsky.social online seminar series about: Turning morphology into numbers across microscopy scales and modalities; a perforce ride from imaging to image analysis to model generation to prediction. bio-mat-sketches-mor.blogspot.com/2025/03/virg...
bio-mat-sketches-mor.blogspot.com
Virginie Uhlmann: Turning morphology into numbers across microscopy scales and modalities
A visual blog about science and tissue engineering. Based on live doodles/sketchnotes done during talks. Some with an abstract/writeup.
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Idris Sunmola @idris1.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
Check out our preprint on the SOTA Surgical Gaussian Surfels. We render surgical scenes at high fidelity in real time using Gaussian Surfels. #AcademicSky #GaussianSplatting arxiv.org/abs/2503.04079
arxiv.org
Surgical Gaussian Surfels: Highly Accurate Real-time Surgical Scene Rendering
Accurate geometric reconstruction of deformable tissues in monocular endoscopic video remains a fundamental challenge in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. Although recent volumetric and point...
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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
Seattle science colleagues (and friends): I hope you’re ready to see the awesome artistic skills (or lack thereof) on our lab’s posters at the science march tomorrow! Come for the science! Stay for your community!
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Kim Stachenfeld, PhD @neurokim.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
Washington Square Park, Friday 12-3pm in NYC! Safety tips: standupforscience2025.org/protest-safe...
standupforscience2025.org
Protest Safety
Our goal at Stand Up for Science is to host a series of nationwide nerd parties that–and this is the most important part–empower people to take continued steps to advocate for science as a tool for…
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