7/ One of the canonical textbooks is this one, the Kandel. It has beautiful figures and is a good reference. There is so much to learn! Thanks to my SFU neuro colleagues for giving me some initial pointers - I'll be taking courses this Fall. Always open to more resources! /Fin

6/ Underneath the grey matter, we have white matter that is made up mostly of axons that connect more distant brain areas. It's white from the myelination of the axons, a process involved in long-term learning.

5/ Brodmann visually segmented the cortex based on patterns of neurons in these layers. It turns out that the areas he visually segmented differed functionally as well, resulting in the Brodmann areas.

4/ Grey matter in the cortex (primarily in the outer surface of the brain) is composed mostly of neurons and local connections. The cortex has 6 layers. Layer 4 is mainly connections to the thalamus which receives much of the body's sensory input.

3/ ANNs model excitatory neurons. But there also exist inhibitory neurons! These reduce the likelihood of firing. We don't model inhibitory neurons in typical artificial NNs. Glutamate is the neurotransmitter involved in excitatory processes, and GABA for inhibitory ones.

2/ The human brain is not a purely feed-forward network like an ANN. It's a dynamical system with feedback loops. For instance, a seizure involves a cycle of uncontrolled activation, which afaik can't happen in your typical ANN.

1/ In humans, the timing of input into a neuron matters. If you have two action potentials entering a soma, arriving at the same time could cause it to fire. BUT the same inputs with some delay between each other might not. In a typical artificial NN, timing doesn't matter.

What are some basic things a computer scientist should know about the brain? I teach an Intro to AI course, and my slides include one diagram of a biological neuron that inspired the perceptron. But that's it! I'm just learning some of the things we don't teach 🤯 A thread 🧵

RT @BernardJBaars: Emotions are not irrational intrusions; they are evolved signals that guide decision-making under uncertainty. Conscious….

RT @WiMLworkshop: Come and join us listen to @petitegeek’s talk on Multimodal Learning for Interactive Embodied AI! Very cool demos! https:….

RT @WiMLworkshop: Don’t miss @petitegeek, assistant professor at @SFU_CompSci, sharing their perspective at the panel discussion #WiML at #….

Job posting:.

We especially encourage women and underrepresented groups from all areas of Computer Science to apply! There is a generous ($250K) award package for women candidates. SFU also has an excellent parental leave policy, with ~9 months of paid leave at 95% salary. 🙌.

Interested in moving to beautiful Vancouver, Canada? 🇨🇦 We are recruiting Assistant and Associate Professors to the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. We are ranked #1 in Canada in Computer Vision (

Gold advice on how to tweet your research, from journalists @aihuborg and @BotJunkie! Minimal info: what problem are you trying to solve, what is your research contribution?

How far ahead can we predict a human's movements? We tokenize human poses over time and use physics-guided diffusion to predict a person's trajectory and location up to 9 seconds ahead. Paper:

Is emotion recognition in the wild possible? This is a hard problem, especially considering context. We fine-tuned a vision language model with 26 categories and found a very high precision, bringing it closer to use on robots.

How could we define a nonverbal Turing Test for robots? We asked people to use their bodies to test what agents could and could not do. We found they tested physical, emotional and social abilities with 188 unique behaviors!.

Excited to be at #IROS2024 for a keynote at the Workshop on Nonverbal Communication + 3 full papers on emotional intelligence for robots and human prediction! A thread 🧵👇.

Hinton winning the Nobel Prize in Physics: "We should be working hard now to make sure that [AI] doesn't take control away from people. Because what we care about is people. The best young researchers should be putting a lot of effort into that now."