Kira Düsterwald

Largely moving over to bsky.app/profile/kiradu… 🦋

Recharged and ready!🔋 After a massive first week and a well-deserved day off surfing🏄‍♂️ and visiting the penguins🐧, we are back in the classroom. We are thrilled to kick off Cycle 2 today with @alfairhall as our Academic Director! @SimonsFdn @IBROorg

A massive shoutout to our incredible mentors and TAs! 🙌 They delivered 6 wonderful tutorials. Their energy and dedication make this school special.💻🧠🇿🇦 @spiroschv | @kiradusterwald | @dorrell_will | @isabelmaria_c | Colleen Gillon | @rherzoga

This is the moment of the year we’ve been waiting for! 🌍🧠 We are thrilled to welcome you to Noordhoek, Cape Town, for another amazing Imbizo school. Can’t wait to gather, share knowledge, and dive deep into computational neuroscience! Let the learning begin! 🇿🇦✨ #imbizo2026

Remembering Adam Kampff, a dear friend, inspirational teacher, and a remarkable human being. He dedicated his life to broadening scientific education and demystifying modern technology to young people around the world. sainsburywellcome.org/web/research-n…

✈️ Heading to #SfN25? Check out Kira Dusterwald's work "Autistic individuals learn to exploit temporal regularities in simple but not complex contexts" at Early Career Poster Session (Nov 15 18:45-20:45, A21) or Autism: Behavioral Analysis session (Nov 16 13-17, A27).

🙋Are you interested in bridging theory & experiments? Applications are now open for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit & SWC (@SWC_Neuro) joint PhD programme. Join us and be part of a vibrant research community! 💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme ℹ️ ucl.ac.uk/life-sciences/…

Interested in a #PhD in machine learning & theoretical neuroscience? Applications for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit PhD programme are now open! 💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme 🤝 Close links to @SWC_Neuro & @uclcsml ℹ️ ucl.ac.uk/life-sciences/…

The opportunity gap in AI is more striking than ever. We talk way too much about those receiving $100M or whatever for their jobs, but not enough those asking for <$1k to present their work. For 3rd year in a row, @ml_collective is raising funds to support @DeepIndaba attendees.

🤩💫🇿🇦 @smhall97

🎉🚨 Extended Application Deadline! Now July 16, 2025! If you want to learn about the brain💻🧠in the amazing Noordhoek, Cape Town🇿🇦, apply. What to Do Next: Finalise and submit applications before the deadline: imbizo.africa/apply/ Please spread the news. Don’t miss out!

The Data Science and Machine Learning Unit (@myamada0) at OIST is working to improve the algorithms of the information age and how we interact with AI💻⚙ They had 5 papers – 4 written by interns – accepted at the recent #ICLR2025. Learn about the unit 👇 oist.jp/news-center/ne…

Want to spend 3 weeks in South Africa🇿🇦for an unforgettable summer school experience? Imbizo 2026 (imbizo.africa) student applications are OPEN! 💻🏄‍♀️ Lectures, new friends, and Noordhoek beach await. Apply by July 1! 🖇️imbizo.africa/apply/ #Imbizo2026 #CompNeuro

@iclr_conf * (today in Singapore time!)

Looking forward to presenting Tree-WSV for fast unsupervised ground metric learning at @iclr_conf 2025 tomorrow at 3 pm! Come find me at poster #197 🌳

We’re happy to share that members of our MLDS unit (@OISTedu) will present several papers at #ICLR2025! Topics include brain-inspired representation learning, optimal transport, decentralized learning, anomaly detection, and LLM uncertainty quantification. Feel free to stop by our posters if you're around! 🌳 Kira M Düsterwald, Samo Hromadka, & Makoto Yamada. Fast unsupervised ground metric learning with tree-Wasserstein distance. openreview.net/forum?id=FBhKU… @kiradusterwald 🕵️‍♂️ Hossein Mirzaei, Mojtaba Nafez, Jafar Habibi, Mohammad Sabokrou, & Mohammad Hossein Rohban. Adversarially Robust Anomaly Detection through Spurious Negative Pair Mitigation openreview.net/forum?id=t8fu5… @sabokrou 🧠 Satoki Ishikawa, Makoto Yamada, Han Bao, & Yuki Takezawa. PhiNets: Brain-inspired Non-contrastive Learning Based on Temporal Prediction Hypothesis. openreview.net/forum?id=5tjdR… @SisForCollege @levelfour_ @YukiTakeza 🚀 Siqi Zeng, Sixian Du, Makoto Yamada, & Han Zhao. Learning Structured Representations by Embedding Class Hierarchy with Fast Optimal Transport. openreview.net/forum?id=AnL6B… @cindy2000_sh @hanzhao_ml 🌐 Yuki Takezawa, & Sebastian Stich. Scalable Decentralized Learning with Teleportation. openreview.net/forum?id=AvmBg… @YukiTakeza 🤖 Daniel Yang, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, & Makoto Yamada, On Verbalized Confidence Scores for LLMs (ICLR 2025 workshop on Quantify Uncertainty and Hallucination in Foundation Models: The Next Frontier in Reliable AI) openreview.net/forum?id=CVRdN…

I'm excited to announce that I have received the Thuthuka Research Grant from the @NRF_News! I will use this grant to start my own lab focused on comp neuro and ML theory at @WitsUniversity: the @caandl_lab! This is a joint effort with @VictoriaWi83762, @stefsmlab and @geraudnt.

PS to any going through personal issues while finishing a paper, take the time to heal. I'm supremely grateful to my collaborators for their patience & support as I heal. I know that's not universal, but your health should always come first. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Transformers employ different strategies through training to minimize loss, but how do these tradeoff and why? Excited to share our newest work, where we show remarkably rich competitive and cooperative interactions (termed "coopetition") as a transformer learns. Read on 🔎⏬