Dylan Festa

@DrPragya_Mishra Congratulations! 🎉 I am really happy for you! I wish you a long and proficient academic career!

As the lights of Diwali brighten our lives, I find myself reflecting on an illuminating beginning in my professional journey. I am humbly excited to share that I have been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law at Allahabad University.

How do animals handle vast changes in their sensory environments, from the slow changes as the day goes past, to the fast changes as they move from sunlight to shade? We identify a luminance gain control in the fly visual system acting at these fast and slow timescales.

Our @JPhysiol review paper on assembly formation (and function) is out! The work was spearheaded by @christophmiehl and @so_onasch , with me as humble third author, and the impeccable supervision of @GjorJulijana . It was a great pleasure to be part of this project ! 🙏 🥳

The most important lesson I've learned in the last year: Burnout isn't just the result of too much work. It's the TYPE of work. And, more specifically, your emotional connection to it. Burnout comes from feeling like no matter how much you do, it will never be enough.

Could it be that 50 years from now we look back and say: "Oh boy, we used to be blind. How on earth did we miss that the small humans are *not* alright? We even put them all together, have them form little tribes and fight it out, unsupervised, Lord-of-the-Flies-style?... 1/9

Very happy to see this out: we show that synaptic organization (local in the form of clustering and global on the entire dendritic tree) can emerge during development driven by spontaneous activity. Motivated by the interaction of neurotrophin molecules found experimentally

@CoenCagli_Lab For a #tweetprint , see the following thread: twitter.com/DylanFesta/sta…

Finally out: "Neuronal variability reflects probabilistic inference tuned to natural image statistics". Thanks a lot to @CoenCagli_Lab and the other co-authors for making this possible ! doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

A Clear-Eyed Look at Visual Perception: A Q&A with Ruben Coen-Cagli, Ph.D. | Features | Albert Einstein College of Medicine einsteinmed.org/features/2553/…

@shaydanur @moreisdifferent @soylent Yes, I tried Soylent bars, but then I was mostly using the drinks. A valid alternative are Huel bars. They are slightly less tasty, but still very good. And now that I am Europe, it's only Huel for me ;-)

@moreisdifferent @soylent haha! yes bars go better w breakfast. I only drink it to skip lunch on busy days 2-3 times a week so a few drink options suffice my need. @DylanFesta you used to consume bars too, right? was it soylent bars?

Anyone know a good alternative to @Soylent Bars? It seems they've been out of stock for over 6 months straight x__x

When you attend a conference, but you are not presenting... Enjoying the beach and living the (virtual) life at #cosyne2021

8/fin Last but not least, a big thank you to to the other authors and collaborators for their many contributions, and for providing data! Amir Aschner, Aida Davila, Adam Konh, and Ruben Coen-Cagli (@CoenCagli_Lab)

7/n This shows that neural sampling can explain modulatory effects on variability, and that normative approaches based on natural input statistics can capture non-linearities in the response, such as divisive normalization.

Neural responses to the same stimulus are highly variable, how can that be explained? Check the preprint of my work with @CoenCagli_Lab . "Neuronal Variability Reflects Probabilistic Inference Tuned to Natural Image Statistics" (summary 🧵 👇) doi.org/10.1101/2020.0…