Sebastian Seung
@SebastianSeung
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@FlyWireNews @eye_wire . Read @WSJ Top 10 Nonfiction 2012. @PrincetonNeuro @PrincetonCS
Princeton, New Jersey
Joined March 2010
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Quick, what have we learned from the BRAIN Initiative? One sentence or less please.
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1/n Ask yourself...what would FDR do? He would hire a million workers and train them for contact tracing, sanitation, and other public health tasks. Kill two birds with one stone: create jobs and contain the virus.
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We're done! A historic milestone for neuroscience brought to you by the
@FlyWireNews
Consortium. Don't take my word for it. See the glory of the fly brain for yourself at
We are releasing a whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly, including ~130k annotated neurons and tens of millions of typed synapses!
Explore the connectome:
Reconstruction paper:
Annotation paper:
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How are neurons activated by sensory stimuli? For the past century, the only method for addressing this question has been neurophysiology.
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We’re excited to announce FlyWire, the world’s first online community for whole-brain connectomics. Just click on for instant access! In just a few seconds, you can start browsing through an entire fruit fly brain in electron microscopic glory. 1/
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Our “surprisingly popular” algorithm for finding truth even when the majority is wrong. Cover of
@nature
this week.
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@siwonchoi
Thanks
@siwonchoi
of
#SUPERJUNIOR
!!! Music has been most famous export from S Korea. Now it's time to export public health. With music and health, we can all be happy 🎶⚕️⚕️
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2/ S Korea widely regarded as a role model for fighting
#Covid19
. The world needs to learn from their success, but most people can’t read Korean. Let’s make the life-saving information in this playbook accessible to people everywhere.
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Want a chance to make scientific history? Decades later the thrilling sequel to the C. elegans connectome is finally within reach! Join , the global community mapping the connections between every one of the >100,000 neurons in a fly brain.
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Titan of theoretical physics/neuroscience John Hopfield has won
@TheFranklin
Medal in Physics!
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3/ Here in the US, I hear a lot of complaining about our government. But hey, it’s we who are the people, right? We should all pitch in and help in any way we can. That’s why we’re staying home to protect each other.
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4/ And that’s why we’re crowdsourcing this translation. Doing it the old-fashioned way would take longer, and the virus spreads fast. So please share the link, or translate if you can.
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6/ S Korea has succeeded in controlling a major outbreak “without China’s draconian restrictions on speech and movement, or economically damaging lockdowns like those in Europe and the United States.”
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About to celebrate delivery to
@IARPAnews
of visual cortex reconstruction from a petascale EM dataset acquired by
@AllenInstitute
... the climax of Phase 2 of the MICrONS program!
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Asian countries (China, S Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) have already beaten the virus with "five weapons" of public health. So anyone with common sense would fight the virus by wielding all five weapons.
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@dribnet
@RogerGrosse
@hardmaru
@NipsConference
I'd like to see a historian figure out why MIT became so anti-neural nets. I always chalked it up to Minsky and Chomsky, towering geniuses who cast long shadows. Another theory is that the neural nets people (Pitts, Wiener) self-destructed.
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@schoppik
SOM is the seat of the soul. The axon of the SOM cell (green) ascends toward the Holy Dura Mater in Paradise. SOM struggles to contain the sordid impulses of pyramidal cells (red), studded with thorns and sending axons down to Inferno.
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Central brain is done! Optic lobes well underway. The fly connectome is nearing completion.
The fly central brain synthesizes sensory stimuli into decisions and actions. For the first time, ALL 46,944 branched and far-reaching neurons of both hemispheres of the central brain have been reconstructed and are available via FlyWire.
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Look carefully...only in Princeton is a fire alarm answered by the "plasma physics department"!
@PPPLab
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Shout out to
@element_ai
for the warm airport welcome! Advice to AI companies: station your recruiters at Montreal airport starting now... Early bird gets the deep learner.
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Awesome! If the other States join too, maybe we could call it the United States of America?
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Congrats! We are all grateful for Google's contributions to the field.
10 years of Connectomics at Google and a new human cortex publication in Science!
It has been a huge honor to pursue brain mapping advances at Google Research with so many amazing colleagues and collaborators. 🙏
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This is a beautiful exception to the rule that a neuron is a functional unit. Electrical signals have been shown to spread very little inside this cell. This is because neurites loop like crazy, lengthening the path >10x.
#pictureofthemonth
: The CT1 large-field neuron operates like 1400 individual cells and forms a microcircuit, which turns excitatory into inhibitory signals. Discovered by the Borst department, this microcircuit is one important puzzle piece in decoding motion vision in fruit
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Flies are highly visual animals. That’s obvious to anyone who has ever tried to swat one. So it should be no surprise that eyes are so prominent on the fly head.
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7/ “The first cases of
#Covid19
were reported in the United States and South Korea on the same day.” True! Fact-checked by Snopes.
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All the talk about flattening the curve shows a lack of ambition. The richest country in the world should be able to stop transmission. China and South Korea are succeeding.
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This video shows the "cartridges" of chandelier cells (colors) making synapses onto axon initial segments of pyramidal cells (gray). The cartridges resemble candlesticks; hence the name chandelier.
Different cell types in the brain have their own connectivity rules and patterns. In a recently published study, our
#neuroscience
researchers took a deep dive into the connectomics of an important but enigmatic cell type, the chandelier cell. 🧵1
📄
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12/ “It’s not just about physical distancing, it’s not just about locking down,” he said. “In China, and in Singapore, in Korea, they really focused on having that comprehensive strategy.”
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Here are his reminiscences about how a solid state physicist ended up theorizing about biology and the brain. And how creative people face the "Now what?" question.
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8/ As has been widely reported, S Korea ramped up to a very high rate of testing early on.
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The
@COVID_Translate
Project has launched! 75 pages from a whirlwind of volunteer activity over the past 3 days.
Thanks to our amazing volunteers, the COVID19 Response Guidelines by
@KoreaCDC
are now available in English:
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Our new preprint on cortical connectomics.
Our newest preprint! EM and neural activity images from three million cubic microns of mouse visual cortex. Four scientific vignettes from organelles to synapses to circuit structure and function
@BCMHouston
@PrincetonNeuro
@AllenInstitute
@IARPAnews
1/20
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Excitement and nerve-wracking tension no doubt. They're shooting to cut 25,000 slices. each one 40 nanometers thin. That's right---nanometers.
Excitement is in the air
#HereAtAllen
as our Electron Microscopy team begins sectioning brain samples for the largest
#electronmicroscopy
dataset ever recorded! 🙌 This is part of a collaborative effort to map nearly a billion synaptic connections in 1mm³ of brain tissue.
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10/ Now that the US and other Western countries are finally catching up with testing, they should study the rest of S Korea’s playbook. Let’s make it possible through translation.
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I'm immensely proud of my students, postdocs, and staff for pulling off this feat. What an adventure!
Last week, we released our IARPA MICrONS electron microscopy (EM) reconstruction with functional data. True to ARPA heritage, this was a moonshot program for every stage. 1/n
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9/ S Korea introduced innovations like drive-thru testing in parking lots and “phone booth” testing in hospitals
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Iceland is the most successful non-Asian country to bring Covid under control (stats at ). Like S Korea, Iceland has won without strangling its economy. Here's why it's an interesting role model.
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I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
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13/ Jung Eun-kyeong, now legendary
@KoreaCDC
head. A ‘reporter asked...about...a rumor...that she sleeps less than an hour each night. “More than an hour,” she corrected him, before moving on to the next question.’ /end
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11/ “Mike Ryan, the
@WHO
’s emergencies head, warned on Sunday that lockdowns wouldn’t be enough to control the pandemic and urged governments to focus on identifying and isolating infected people and their contacts.”
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DeepMath 2020 () is now accepting abstract submissions on mathematical
theory of deep neural networks! This year's amazing speakers include
@GittaKutyniok
@rbaraniuk
, Demba Ba, Rene Vidal, Stefanie Jegelka, Eero Simoncelli & more!
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Fantastic team of volunteer translators finalizing plan for v0.9 release at noon Monday! Lots of quality control still left to be done.
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Don't miss the symposium "Connectomics: a new era of dissemination and discovery," chaired by yrs truly! An all-star cast of speakers on how connectomic resources are enabling new insights into the brain. 7-9pm ET Oct 29
@neuromatch
Register at
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@TheFranklin
His 1982 and 1984 PNAS papers launched a generation of theoretical physicists (eventually including me) into neural net research.
Well worth reading for style as well as content.
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6/n So hire a million public health workers. People who can't work at their restaurant/bar jobs. College students who can't get summer internships. All the people struggling to find decent employment could have a job that pays well and feels meaningful.
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Based on this circuit, I conjecture that flies can perceive illusory contours and corners. If my predictions turn out to be accurate, it will be like winning a war before ever firing a shot.
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TL;DR New preprint with discovery: many interneuron types in the fly visual system function as highly specific normalizers.
My new preprint attempts to explain the function of interneuron diversity in the fly visual system. The answer (or at least the beginning of it) falls in your lap once you have the connectome.
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I'm delighted to announce that I will be serving as Chief Research Scientist
@Samsung
while also continuing my research and teaching
@PrincetonNeuro
&
@PrincetonCS
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I am continuing to manage my
@Princeton
lab remotely, and more tweets about our advances in connectomics are coming soon.
@ylecun
has written about how the “dual affiliation model” is benefiting both industry and academia.
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Yet another thread to summarize "What have we learned from the BRAIN Initiative?" Now responses related to non-human research
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Calling all GUI wizards and Raspberry Pi gurus! Volunteer to write code that SAVES LIVES by joining
@DJCohenEtAl
@Princeton
MAE team building critical care ventilator for COVID-19 patients. Please spread the word! cc
@covidbrains
1/
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Enjoyed his previous books in my youth. This looks great too!
1/3 Initial thoughts on Gil Strang’s new linear algebra book.
Short story -> the book is absolutely terrific and I think anyone with a linear algebra background will enjoy it immensely.
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@doristsao
reminded me of that day at the White House...ages and ages ago it seems. Now it's my turn...what have *I* learned from the BRAIN Initiative?
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My new preprint attempts to explain the function of interneuron diversity in the fly visual system. The answer (or at least the beginning of it) falls in your lap once you have the connectome.
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4/n Many people have come to the conclusion that lockdown is necessary. But don't be naive and think that some weeks/months of lockdown will solve our problem. Lockdown is only the first step...it gives us time to implement containment.
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9/n There is no way out. We have no choice but to adopt and implement containment. Unless we capitulate and let the epidemics run their course. Please no more defeatist talk that containment is no longer possible. /end
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If it was a power struggle over AI safety, why wouldn't the board take the moral high ground and say so? Instead they merely insinuate that he is dishonest. But the dishonesty is evidently about matters they can't reveal. It sounds fishy...
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@ylecun
is saying those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Can any of his critics point to the best recent papers showing that generative models find representations that are helpful for visual recognition and understanding?
Modeling the world for action by generating pixel is as wasteful and doomed to failure as the largely-abandoned idea of "analysis by synthesis".
Decades ago, there was a big debate in ML about the relative advantages of generative methods vs discriminative methods for
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Last year we completed the whole fly brain. Onward to an entire fly CNS! (brain + ventral nerve cord, analog of spinal cord)
The BANC is open. Deposit your expertise in the newest community-created connectome:
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At the request of
@WorldBank
, S Korean govt shared COVID-19 response tools and strategies to help developing countries. HT
@chicagom
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Congrats
@sdorkenw
for winning the Larry Katz Prize! A great honor for Sven and a tribute to a brilliant neuroscientist who did so much to advance our knowledge of neural circuits.
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How S Korea fights COVID... detailed documents now translated into six languages.
English 🇺🇸, Romanian 🇷🇴, Russian 🇷🇺, Italian 🇮🇹, Spanish 🇪🇸, and Indonesian 🇮🇩 -- That's six, and there's more on the way.
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I always use this example to show that a patent can be useless if an invention is too far ahead of its time.
There were two patents on ConvNets: one for ConvNets with strided convolution, and one for ConvNets with separate pooling layers.
They were filed in 1989 and 1990 and allowed in 1990 and 1991.
1/N
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With Seiji Ogawa at the Masao Ito Symposium in Tokyo. He discovered the BOLD signal at Bell Labs If there is a Nobel for fMRI he should get it.
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5/n The Imperial College report argues that mitigation w/o containment will fail, because lifting the restrictions w/o containment will lead to another outbreak.
We can now read the Imperial College report on COVID-19 that led to the extreme measures we've seen in the US this week. Read it; it's terrifying. I'll offer a summary in this thread; please correct me if I've gotten it wrong.
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We used connectomics to demonstrate space-time wiring specificity in 2014. For the past eight years, many physiologists rejected this as a mechanism for retinal direction selectivity. Now the hypothesis is supported by a beautiful and challenging experiment.
New paper from the Awatramani lab (with
@BenMurphyBaum
and twitterless first author Prerna Srivastava) in
@eLife
!
Spatiotemporal properties of glutamate input support direction selectivity in the dendrites of retinal starburst amacrine cells
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For those of you who partied too hard last night, here's the best description of how you felt this morning.
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7/n All you need is mobile phone and internet. Work from home. Call the patient. Call the contacts. Call in the sanitation team.
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Very cool...10x fewer neurons than Drosophila brain but still a flying insect!
Do you think that even the Drosophila connectome is too complex to parse? Check out the latest connectomics results from a much smaller flying insect, Megaphragma, in collaboration with H. Hess, S. Xu, S. Pang
#SfN2022
Monday morning poster 328.16 / YY35
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I'm teaching my neural nets class () and was disappointed that the LeNet demo GIFs at are no longer accessible. I've been showing them for 20 years, but now they require sign-in 😭
@ylecun
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1/ Every square is orange! Thanks to round-the-clock effort by amazing volunteer team, complete first draft translation of all 75 pages. Crowd power is unbelievably swift. Moving to Phase 2, quality control in three areas: technical accuracy, verbal style, visual style.
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Fascinating historical thread describing Japan's WWII surrender on August 15, 1945. That day was also the end of Japan's 35-year occupation of Korea. 8-15 is commemorated as a national holiday in Korea, literally translated as "Return of the Light."
On the afternoon of August 14, 1945, a D.C. police officer pulled over a car for making an illegal U-turn. After ten minutes, the driver was allowed to proceed.
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Agree that cell types have to be discussed, as I think they are single biggest investment of the BRAIN Initiative. So we face the question, "What do all these cell types do?" There are some answers in retina hypothalamus etc. Less convinced about cortex.
@SebastianSeung
We also learned that cell types matter, a lot! BRAIN initiative tools allowed us to measure and manipulate cortical cell types with unprecedented precision. This uncovered that cells in the same area, but from different cell classes, have different roles in behavior.
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8/n NYC had 1351 new cases today. Every one of them needs contact tracing.
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Canada takes its AI very seriously. This is plastered all over Montreal baggage claim!
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Today visual neuroscience enters the connectomic era.
See preprint by Matsliah, Yu, and others from the FlyWire Consortium
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Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
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The paper that launched a thousand physicists
(into neural nets and neurobiology)
Woohoo! Indeed 40 years old today. Such a powerful idea with important consequences for so many disciplines. Congrats to the author
@HopfieldJohn
!
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New prize for decoding a memory from a connectome.
Neuroscientists: Let’s put theories to ultimate test –decode a non-trivial memory from static map of synaptic connectivity. My org is putting up $100,000 challenge but we need you to help define rules. RT or DM to join private discussion.
@AspirationNeuro
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Crowdsourcing can indeed be powerful. 75 pages translated last weekend, lightning speed for a complex technical document. I believe that v0.9 is highly accurate (more on why later), and this will improve further with v1.0. 1/
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Just as it looked like S Korea was winning the war, a new cluster sprang up in Seoul (yellow bars) and is growing fast.
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Here's the kicker: S Korea also has epistemic condition for reopening, and it's quantitative. 95% of infections must be *explainable*. Cases that can't be traced back to an infection source must make public health officials feel insecure about their control over the situation.
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Lots of talk about explainability in AI. I didn't expect that explainability would be important for public health. Let's compare S Korea reopening conditions with
@WhiteHouse
Opening Up America Again.
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@ylecun
The name of the cost function is "unworldliness," according to the classic tongue-in-cheek lesson of
@ProfFeynman
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2/n He would call it the Wuhan Progress Administration (WPA) because such language is bipartisan 🙃 Cost would be a small fraction of the trillion dollar stimulus package.
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A cell type in the fly visual system is analogous to a feature map or channel in a convolutional net, because every cell of one type performs the same computation at a different location. H/T
@srinituraga
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Cajal would be jealous ...
Neuron render workflow:
1. Team up to find and proofread cells in
@FlyWireTweet
. These are DM4s from
@emil_kind
and citizen scientist st0ck53y
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Ah yes my favorite holiday of the year...
Guess who's anniversary it is?
Happy Halloween!!!
#SamsungResearch
#SebastianSeung
#CLUE
-30thAnniversary
#AnswerComingSoon
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