Keiland Cooper

Check out our most recent proceedings paper on the intersection of continual learning with causality research! Then dive deep into all of the great papers in the issue. More to come soon!

A massive thank you and congratulations to you, @kw_cooper, for leading this humongous project. We hope this review paper is a fun and useful read to those interested in data analysis of neural activity data.

A huge thank you to my co-authors @NorbertFortin at @ucicnlm, @UCIneurobio and Babak Shahbaba at @UCIbrenICS Check out the paper and visit neurodatascience.org for updated resources and tools!

There is something in each section for everyone: students can get a field-level "big picture" (past), experts can stay current on new methods (present), and research program planners can identify the gaps (like data storage and training) we need to fill to reach the future.

From mechanical gears in the 1930s to deep learning in the 2020s, the way we study the brain has been a race between technology and analysis. How do we close the gap? Our new paper, doi.org/10.1080/269418… traces this journey, offers resources, and notes a plan for the future.

Neurodatascience: Past, Present, and Future #Computational #Neuroscience #DataScience #Data #MachineLearning tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

@sivers Derek - Another drop in a sea of brilliance. You're awesome. Don't change for anyone except yourself.

When I was 17, I was driving recklessly and crashed into an oncoming car. I found out that I broke the other driver’s spine, and she’ll never walk again. I felt so horrible about it for so many years that at age 35 I decided to find this woman to apologize.

@MinyiShen @mbeisen Academia does have a business model...

@mbeisen Normally a cult has a business model and usually makes money. Not in academia

Academia is a cult

This morning at NeurIPS, Rich Sutton reminded us that we need continual learning to reach AGI. This afternoon, Ali Behrouz presented a Google poster paper, Nested Learning, which provides new ideas on the path to continual learning. I recorded the 40 minute talk as it might be useful for some researchers in the audience. For the rest of us, I subscribe to Andrej Karpathy's suspicion that it will take a 5-10 papers like this to move us to AGI from where we are now, just like it took about 10 papers to move from 2012's AlexNet to ChatGPT. At the very end, I ask Ali how far along to continual learning this represents. Full paper link below, as well as a YouTube link. ps. sorry about the first 2 minutes of bad audio since there were 2 idiots standing beside me have a conversation right in front of this presenter in a rather packed poster presentation. Honestly, tamp down your egos guys and show come common courtesy!

Snippet of my #StandUpForScience speech at the Minnesota State Capitol 🧪🧬 🧠 #ScienceIsForEveryone ✨ #ScienceNotSilence

The @ContinualAI Seminars are back! ♾🥳 Join us on Thursday, February 6th 🕕 6 PM CET | 🕘 9 AM PT | 🕛 12 AM ET Let's discuss Task-Agnostic Continual Learning for the Open World with Megan Baker and @gusseppebravo Register here 👉 stanford.zoom.us/meeting/regist…

@elonmusk @maejemison and 100yss have entered the chat

Even if we fail at creating a Mars colony that can grow without continuous support from Earth, the absurdly ambitious nature of the goal nonetheless results in the creation of alien-level technology that is crushingly better than competitors who merely aim for Earth orbit.

In 2016, researchers at the University of Adelaide tested Kurt Vonnegut's theory that, "There’s no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers." They took the emotional arcs of 1300+ novels from Project Gutenberg, turned that into data, used modern tech to analyze the emotional arcs, and then identified 6 patterns seen over and over again in western storytelling. Here they are: 1. Rags to Riches (rise) Your classic underdog tale. A humble, hardworking peasant climbs the mountain to pull the sword from the stone. • Rocky • King Arthur • The Pursuit of Happiness 2. Riches to Rags (fall) Maybe the saddest story of them all. A journey from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. • King Lear • Citizen Kane • Scarlet Letter 3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise) A character’s doing fine, gets herself into a huge problem, but figures out how to overcome it. They often end up better than they started. “You see this story again and again,” Vonnegut says. “People love it, and it is not copyrighted.” • The Martian • The Hunger Games • Shawshank Redemption 4. Icarus (rise then fall) The hero goes on a meteoric rise up New York (or some other) society, calls everyone “old sport,” and throws the wildest parties in town. Then reality sets in, and he realizes he’s too close to the sun. • Macbeth • Great Gatsby • Death of a Salesman 5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise) I’ll leave this description to Vonnegut: “We’re gonna start way down here. Worse than that, who is so low? It’s a little girl… the shoe fits, and she achieves off-scale happiness.” • Red Rising • Slumdog Millionaire • The Count of Monte Cristo This is my personal favorite. 6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall) Up until the ~70% mark of the story it looks like things are sunshine and rainbows. Walter White goes from high school teacher to king of the drug lords, if you will. Then all goes wrong. The original fall is often not their doing while the final fall is. • Hamlet • Gone Girl • Breaking Bad My 3 takeaways: 1. Rags to Riches, Oedipus, and Cinderella rank as the three most popular with consumers. AKA, those books sold the most copies. 2. When you think through a story, give it an emotional shape. Literally draw it. X axis: Time Y axis: Ill fortune to good fortune You might be surprised how much it helps you craft your plot (I was shocked). 3. Vonnegut was a damn genius.

@Perpetualmaniac crowdstrike engineers rn

POV: You’re listening to Eminem’s new album #TheDeathofSlimShady

To everyone who has been shocked and depressed by the staggering 40% cut to the BRAIN Initiative: we have a voice! Outside Witness Testimony (aka written testimony) for the FY 2025 appropriations cycle is ongoing. Deadline for the House side is Friday May 3 and the Senate side is Friday May 24. Let's all write in with our thoughts about what this cut means for scientific progress and for medical advances to help patients suffering the most devastating neurological and psychiatric illnesses. Please see instruction links and more information here: House Outside Witness Testimony: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-subs… Senate Outside Witness Testimony: appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/… Please RT @SfNtweets @MichaelJFoxOrg @alzassociation @alsassociation

"If you can approach the world's complexities ... with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine... "