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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 6d

If you're interested in doing your PhD with us, please apply via the ELLIS PhD program!

We're looking for talented people interested in the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience.

ELLIS @ellis.eu · 7d

🎓 The application portal for the #ELLISPhD Program is open today! Info & link: https://bit.ly/45DSe75

ELLIS PhD Program: Call for Applications 2025

The ELLIS mission is to create a diverse European network that promotes research excellence and advances breakthroughs in AI, as well as a pan-European PhD program to educate the next generation of AI...

ellis.eu

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Aug 15

Touch base with me if you have any questions. I’m happy to chat!

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Aug 15

🎯 Göttingen is a small university town (around 120k people) and very family friendly. Everything within the city can be reached by bike within 15 min.

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Aug 15

🌍 Göttingen is located in the center of Germany and Europe, in a region known for its green hills, lovely small towns with half-timbered houses and the Harz Mountains. Well-connected through motorways and high-speed trains.

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Aug 15

🎓The @goettingen-campus.de is highly collaborative, has a great variety of data-intensive research in natural and life sciences, social science and humanities, including top-notch places like @mpi-nat.bsky.social, @mpsgoettingen.bsky.social, MPI-DS, @primatenzentrum.bsky.social, @dlr-en.bsky.social

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Aug 15

The position is embedded in the recently founded Lower Saxony Center for AI and Causal Methods in Medicine (CAIMed) caimed.de/en/ as well as the Campus Institute Data Science (CIDAS), Göttingen.

Home - CAIMed - Niedersächsisches Zentrum für KI und Kausale Methoden in der Medizin

CAIMed is the Lower Saxony research center for artificial intelligence and causal methods in medicine. We develop innovative methods for improved, personalized healthcare and contribute to the managem...

caimed.de

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Aug 15

💡It's a deliberately broad call. Areas of interest include: RL; VR, AR & digital avatars; Embodied AI, NLP; HCI; Causal models; Time series models; Multimodal data integration; Image analysis and CV; Computational and simulation science; Visualization; HPC and Energy-efficient AI.

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Aug 15

📢 We have an opening for a tenure track assistant professor position (W1 t.t. W2) in AI in our CS dept @uni-goettingen.de, Germany.
⏰ Application deadline: Sept 19
🗣️ Please share!
uni-goettingen.de/en/697924.html

W1-TT-W2 Artificial Intelligence - Georg-August-University Göttingen

Website of the Georg-August-University Göttingen

uni-goettingen.de

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Reposted by Alexander Ecker

Kaja Wierucka @kajawierucka.bsky.social · Apr 29

📢 Fully-funded PhD opportunity!

Explore the links between social & communication networks in ring-tailed lemurs!

Exciting fieldwork, interdisciplinary team, and innovative technologies! Apply now and join @primatenzentrum.bsky.social & @unigoettingen.bsky.social for this cutting-edge research!

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 18

In Lurz et al., ICLR 2021 we did quite some analysis on scaling and generalization across animals in the context of visual response prediction (incl. behavioral modulation) with @sinzlab.bsky.social and @andreastolias.bsky.social: openreview.net/forum?id=Tp7...

Generalization in data-driven models of primary visual cortex

Deep neural networks (DNN) have set new standards at predicting responses of neural populations to visual input. Most such DNNs consist of a convolutional network (core) shared across all neurons...

openreview.net

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Reposted by Alexander Ecker

Nature Methods @natmethods.nature.com · Apr 14

A Perspective from the Ecker lab discusses the progress and challenges of using computer vision approaches for behavior studies of primates in natural environments.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

...and of course – shame on me for the oversight – the great @philipp.hertie.ai

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

Thanks to co-authors Marissa Weis, Stelios Papadopoulos, @lhansel.bsky.social, Timo Lüddecke, Brendan Celii, Paul Fahey, Nuno da Costa, Forrest Collman, @csdashm.com , @clayreid.bsky.social, @sebastianseung.bsky.social, @viajake.bsky.social & Andreas Tolias. Funding: @erc.europa.eu & IARPA (12/12)

ky.social

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

It's been great fun to be part of the MICrONS consortium. (11/12)

bsky.app/profile/alle...

Allen Institute @alleninstitute.org · Apr 9

How does the brain work?

Scientists are closer to the answer with the largest wiring diagram and functional map of a mammalian brain to date. 🧵

🧠📈

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

Using the power of the MICrONS dataset, we could show that our functional digital twin of the neurons could predict the basal bias of cells in lower layer 4 without this model having access to any morphological information. (10/12)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

We found a novel morphological trait in layer 4: neurons that are primarily located in V1 in a narrow stripe around the L4-L5 boundary. These neurons are atufted and avoid reaching into L5 with their basal dendrites. (9/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

There morphological differences between primary visual cortex (V1) and higher visual areas (HVA): In layer 4, atufted neurons are primarily located in V1, while tufted neurons are more abundant in areas AL and RL. (8/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

Neurons in layer 2/3 show strong trends with increasing cortical depth: (1) decreasing width of their dendritic arbor and (2) smaller tufts. (7/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

Dendritic morphologies vary with respect to three major axes: (1) the soma depth, (2) the total skeletal length of the apical dendrites and (3) the total skeletal length of the basal dendrites. (6/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

Dendritic morphologies form mostly a continuum, with distinct clusters only in deeper layers (e.g. layer 5 ET neurons). A quantitative test using synthethic surrogate data suggested that from layer 2 throughout upper layer 5 no density gaps exist and dendritic morphologies change continuously (5/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

Our learned embeddings capture the essence of the 3D morphology of neurons and reflect known excitatory cell types from mouse V1. (4/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

We employed GraphDINO, a self-supervised method for learning representations of neuronal morphologies without relying on manual annotations. The model outputs a vector embedding for each neuron that captures the morphological features of its dendritic tree. (3/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

The data underlying our analysis is from the MICrONS consortium: a ~1mm³ volume of tissue from the mouse visual cortex, densely reconstructed using serial section electron microscopy, segmented into more than 54,000 individual neurons, among them ~30,000 excitatory ones. (2/12)

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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · Apr 11

📣 Now out in Nature Communications as part of the MICrONS package: Our study on excitatory morphological cell types in mouse visual cortex led by Marissa Weis. We describe a set of principles that capture the morphological diversity excitatory neurons. A thread: (1/12)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An unsupervised map of excitatory neuron dendritic morphology in the mouse visual cortex - Nature Communications

Excitatory neurons in the neocortex exhibit considerable morphological diversity, yet their organizational principles remain a subject of ongoing research. Here, the authors use unsupervised learning ...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Alexander Ecker

SFB 1528 - Cognition of Interaction @sfb1528.bsky.social · Apr 11

SFB Paper Alert!

That’s teamwork: 14 SFB members across nine projects put together a perspective paper on “Computer vision for primate behavior analysis in the wild”, which was published in @naturemethods.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computer vision for primate behavior analysis in the wild - Nature Methods

In this Perspective, Vogg et al. discuss the progress and challenges of using computer vision approaches in the behavioral analysis of primates in their natural environment.

www.nature.com

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