iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Marvin Maechler, PhD

Paper Skygest Team @paper-feed.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

**Please repost** If you're enjoying Paper Skygest -- our personalized feed of academic content on Bluesky -- we'd appreciate you reposting this! We’ve found that the most effective way for us to reach new users and communities is through users sharing it with their network

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What if you took a real image, dumped it into chatGPT with the prompt “don’t alter this, just return it”? Would the returned image have the watermark? Trying to update how much I believe that “watermark = fake”

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It does feel a little like gambling sometimes

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I got a whole PhD to get that bug out of my system

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

5. you can’t prove you are not a “brain in a jar”

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Does this acronym mean “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) or “looking at Code” (laC)?

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Reposted by Marvin Maechler, PhD

hakwan lau @hakwan.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

for undergrads getting their degrees this Fall: if u're computationally savvy & wants to get into cog neuro -- instead of taking up lab manager / RA positions, why not come to Korea & get a master's degree instead? it will be all paid for w/ stipend, of coz. why would u pay for a master's degree??

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

So happy to see this one out! We worked incredibly hard to wrangle data from these octopuses, and I'm so proud of Marie for pushing it all the way through to publication. 🐙

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Reposted by Marvin Maechler, PhD

Marie Kieseler, Ph.D. @mlkieseler.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Excited to share that our paper on mirror use in octopuses is published today in @currentbiology.bsky.social! This is the first time mirror-mediated spatial navigation has been demonstrated in an invertebrate. 🐙 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

Octopus bimaculoides can learn to utilize a mirror to localize a reward outside the line of sight

Mirror-mediated localization of hidden objects is well documented in vertebrates1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 but has never been demonstrated in inverteb…

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Consciousness is also useful for a kind of simulation/hypothesis testing way of deciding how to act. You can imagine what would happen if you jumped off the cliff. No need to learn from the real experience.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

This is why you should only sign your nice reviews and submit the nasty ones anonymously

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Spirit was a terrible airline and the fact they are shutting down is good.

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Reposted by Marvin Maechler, PhD

Mengting Fang @mtfang.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

🎯New preprint! The resource-rational dynamics of evidence accumulation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Evidence accumulation isn’t stationary. It is dynamically controlled to trade off information gain against cognitive effort. With Jiang Mao, Tobias Donner @donnerlab.bsky.social, Alan Stocker

biorxiv.org

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

My PhD advisor told me that there are two axes to evaluate a problem against: how much you care and how easy it is to solve. You should not work on problems you don’t care about and you should prefer problems that are easier for you to solve. Worst case you work on something hard and meaningless.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Fellow tab hoarders, has anyone found a good method for closing large numbers of tabs while somehow remembering what they were and why you kept them open in the first place? Using open tabs as a to-do or to-read list has become unsustainable #academicsky

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

I'm honored to receive the Penn AI Fellowship with support from @upenndddi.bsky.social! The fellowship supports my research on computational models of perception and cognitive bias. Specifically, we want to understand when and why both brains and AI systems are susceptible to cognitive biases.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

One way of interpreting perception is to say "given the neural activity in my sensory system, what is the most likely cause of this activity". Doing that involves a very sophisticated world model, which this hypothetical car would also have to have.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

I think this really undersells what the human sensory apparatus achieves (I acknowledge that I might be biased because of what I study). Seeing is more than just pointing your eyes at something.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

A paper we started working on SEVEN YEARS ago got accepted for publication this week 🎉

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

The problem is less cute but more clear when it is rephrased as: "You are a doctor caring for five patients who need a different organ each. They will die if no organ donors are found. Would you kill a healthy nurse to harvest the needed organs?".

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Reposted by Marvin Maechler, PhD

Erica Townsend, PhD @ericastownsend.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

very excited to share some of the final bits of work from my PhD! 🎉 we find that phasic DA in the accumbens simultaneously tracks persistent motivation towards reward cues in addition to new learning (but maybe not RPE?!) in sign-tracking rats. check out the preprint below!

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

What platform can we use to play this with you guys?

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Reposted by Marvin Maechler, PhD

SfN Journals @sfnjournals.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

#JNeurosci: A functional MRI study from @maechlermarvin.bsky.social‬ et al. identify brain regions that might be the source of hemifield-specific capacity limits in attentional tracking of multiple moving objects. vist.ly/3n7a9wt

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

I have to thank a lot of people for their help with this, but for this post I will limit myself to my dissertation committee: @violastoermer.bsky.social @rolfslab.bsky.social @carolinerobertson.bsky.social and Peter Tse, who were incredibly supportive and provided guidance throughout this process.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Our research challenges previous explanations of hemispatial neglect and enhances our understanding of how the brain manages spatial attention and mental effort. Additionally, we identify regions that might be the source of hemifield-specific capacity limits in attentional tracking.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

We show that the load-dependent responses differ between earlier visual areas, which prefer targets on the contralateral side, and later areas that respond to targets anywhere in the visual field.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Our findings reveal brain areas where effort-driven increases in activity are dependent on the visual hemifield where targets are tracked.

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Marvin Maechler, PhD @maechlermarvin.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

We investigated how attentional effort impacts brain activity. Effort (the number of targets in a multiple-object tracking task) parametrically drives activity in the attention system.

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