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Auguste Schulz

@auschulz.bsky.social

850 followers 350 following 30 posts

PhD student @mackelab.bsky.social - machine learning in (neuro)science. Co-CEO of KI macht Schule gGmbH

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Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Dec 11

1) With our @neuripsconf.bsky.social poster happening tomorrow, it's about time to introduce our Spotlight paper 🔦, co-lead with @jkapoor.bsky.social:

Latent Diffusion for Neural Spiking data (LDNS), a latent variable model (LVM) which addresses 3 goals simultaneously:

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

The Viking (Gunnar Blohm) @gunnarblohm.bsky.social · Aug 26

Having fun facilitating this amazing group of young Profs at the #Neuro4Pros workshop with @kordinglab.bsky.social and @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer.

Watch out world: this is the next generation of leaders!

compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Machine Learning in Science @mackelab.bsky.social · Jul 23

New preprint: SBI with foundation models!
Tired of training or tuning your inference network, or waiting for your simulations to finish? Our method NPE-PF can help: It provides training-free simulation-based inference, achieving competitive performance with orders of magnitude fewer simulations! ⚡️

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft @hiigberlin.bsky.social · Jun 17

25.6., 19 Uhr: #Wissen für alle!? Im #DigitalerSalon diskutieren Sascha Friesike (@weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social‬), @auschulz.bsky.social und Lennart Glaser, wie #Wissenstransfer in einer immer komplexer werdenden Welt gelingen kann.

👉 Live am HIIG & im Stream: www.hiig.de/events/digit...

Satellitenaufnahme einer Flusslandschaft mit darübergelegtem Text:
„Monatliche Talkreihe – Wissen für alle!? – 25.06.2025 · 19:00 Uhr · Online · HIIG“.
Oben rechts steht „Digitaler Salon“. Unten rechts ein Pfeilsymbol als Weiterleitung.

Grafik mit der Frage: „Wie kann komplexes Wissen verständlich vermittelt werden?“
Darunter zwei Stichpunkte:
– Wissenstransfer soll helfen, komplizierte Sachverhalte und Zusammenhänge auch außerhalb der Fachwelt zugänglicher zu machen.
– Doch wie viel Vereinfachung ist erlaubt? Können und sollten alle Expert*innen für alles sein?
Unten links steht „Digitaler Salon“, unten rechts „2/3“.

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Pedro J. Goncalves @ppjgoncalves.bsky.social · Apr 24

Exciting project in Parkinson's disease! Patrik Verstreken's lab (verstrekenlab.sites.vib.be) and my lab are looking for a postdoc to develop and apply ML methods to the analysis of exciting brain-on-chip data. Please spread the word!

More details at: jobs.vib.be/j/110908/pos...

Postdoc position: Computational methods for neurodegeneration research - VIB

About the labs The Verstreken Lab and the Gonçalves Lab are based in Leuven, Belgium and part of the

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · Apr 17

Crowdsourcing this: what are the best examples of scaling laws in foundation models for neuroscience? My top 3 examples: Ctrl+Labs, Sato et al., Mineault et al. @colehurwitz.bsky.social , @mehdiazabou.bsky.social , @nandahkrishna.bsky.social , @averyryoo.bsky.social, @tyrellturing.bsky.social ?

Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Apr 17

Thanks so much to our fantastic collaborators from the @ramdya.bsky.social lab, the whole @mackelab.bsky.social team, but in particular @vetterj.bsky.social, @rdgao.bsky.social, & @jakhmack.bsky.social, & Gonçalves lab's very own
@ppjgoncalves.bsky.social 🙏🥂 Thanks also to our reviewers & editor!

Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Apr 17

We apply our masked VAE approach to drosophila 🪰walking behavior, a macaque 🐒reach task & a synthetic dataset with access to the ground truth.

We propose calibration checks to evaluate the models’ uncertainty estimates, to avoid making confidently wrong predictions.

Check out the paper for more 🙂

Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Apr 17

We use masked VAEs to address two model desiderata in one model:

1. jointly modeling conditional distributions that are commonly targeted in neuroscience (e.g., encoding 🐭➡️🧠and decoding 🧠 ➡️🐭) and

2. accounting for low-dimensional dynamics underlying both neural activity and behavior. 🌀

Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Apr 17

Thanks so much for the shout-out, and congrats on your exciting work!! 🎉 🙂

Also, a good reminder to share that our work is now out in Cell Reports 🙏🎊

⬇️

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Apr 17

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Cole Hurwitz @colehurwitz.bsky.social · Apr 15

Another step toward a foundation model of the mouse brain: "Neural Encoding and Decoding at Scale (NEDS)"

Trained on neural and behavioral data from 70+ mice, NEDS achieves state-of-the-art prediction of behavior (decoding) and neural responses (encoding) on held-out animals. 🐀

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · Apr 15

It seems as good a time as any to share that I've accepted a new job as Lecturer of Cognitive Neuroscience (equivalent to assistant prof) at the University of Manchester in the UK!

I dusted off the blog to say a bit more about why I'm excited for this move:
tomdonoghue.github.io/ms/2025/04/1...

New Leaf on an Old Page (I got a job!)

tomdonoghue.github.io

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Avery HW Ryoo @averyryoo.bsky.social · Apr 4

Very late, but had a 🔥 time at my first Cosyne presenting my work with @nandahkrishna.bsky.social, Ximeng Mao, @mattperich.bsky.social, and @glajoie.bsky.social on real-time neural decoding with hybrid SSMs. Keep an eye out for a preprint (hopefully) soon 👀

#Cosyne2025 @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Katrin Franke @katrinfranke.bsky.social · Mar 30

I'll be giving a talk at this👇workshop tomorrow #Cosyne2025 @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

In response to the @thetransmitter.bsky.social article by @tyrellturing.bsky.social & Eva Dyer (tinyurl.com/veb7p88f) I'll be talking about:

How do "foundation"/AI models help us (experimenters) study the brain?

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Katrin Franke @katrinfranke.bsky.social · Mar 30

Two more days until our workshop 🥳@cosynemeeting.bsky.social #Cosyne2025

Object-centric neural representations across species 🐒🐁🕷️🐝🖥️

Check out our homepage: toliaslab.org/workshop/cos...

Excellent speakers include @dyamins.bsky.social @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social & many more 🙌

Cosyne 2025 Object Centric Workshop

Website for the object centric workshop at 2025 COSYNE

Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Mar 27

LDNS ➡️ proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...

Masked VAEs ➡️ www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Workshop program ➡️ neurofm-workshop.github.io

Already a bit nostalgic as this will most likely be my last conference as a PhD student — time to slowly wrap up 🎒⌛

Latent Diffusion for Neural Spiking Data

proceedings.neurips.cc

Auguste Schulz @auschulz.bsky.social · Mar 27

Looking forward to presenting our work on Latent Diffusion for Neural Spiking data tonight—Poster 1-108

& experience discussions on scaling in neuroscience firsthand at the foundation model workshop, where I'll talk both about our work on masked VAEs & latent diffusion for neural & behavioral data

Machine Learning in Science @mackelab.bsky.social · Mar 27

We're also at the workshops!

Tuesday at 11:20, @auschulz.bsky.social will give a talk about deep generative models - VAEs and DDPMs - for linking neural activity and behavior, at the workshop on

"Building a foundation model for the brain" (Soutana 1).

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Machine Learning in Science @mackelab.bsky.social · Mar 27

The @mackelab.bsky.social is represented at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #cosyne2025 in Montreal

with 3 posters, 2 workshop talks, and a main conference contributed talk (for the very first time in Mackelab history 🎉)!

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Federico D’Agostino @fededagos.bsky.social · Mar 14

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨
We’ve just launched openretina, an open-source framework for collaborative retina modeling across datasets and species.
A 🧵👇 (1/9)

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

sbi - Simulation-based inference @sbi-devs.bsky.social · Mar 16

sbi 0.24.0 is out! 🎉 This comes with important new features:
- 🎯 Score-based i.i.d sampling
- 🔀 Simultaneous estimation of multiple discrete and continuous parameters or data.
- 📊: mini-sbibm for quick benchmarking.

Just in time for our 1-week SBI hackathon starting tomorrow---stay tuned for more!

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

NERF @nerflabs.bsky.social · Mar 14

New work co-led by @ppjgoncalves.bsky.social introduces a powerful new approach to model conditional distributions of neural and behavioral data using masked variational autoencoders.
Congratulations to @auschulz.bsky.social‬ et al.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(25)00109-3

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Adriana Guatame-García @adrianaguatame.bsky.social · Mar 6

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience.
No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent.
And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted.
... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Çağatay Yıldız @cgtyyldz.bsky.social · Mar 6

For our "Automated Assessment of Teaching Quality" project, we are looking for two PhD students: one in educational/cognitive sciences or a related domain (uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...) and one in machine learning (uni-tuebingen.de/en/faculties...). Please apply and reach me out for details!

PhD Position (m/f/d) in AI-Supported Analysis and Enhancement of Teaching Quality

uni-tuebingen.de

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Jan-Matthis Lueckmann @janmatthis.bsky.social · Mar 4

⚡️ Excited to introduce ZAPBench, our #ICLR2025 spotlight: The Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark measures progress in predicting neural activity within an entire vertebrate brain (70k+ neurons!)

Explore interactive visualizations, datasets, code + paper: google-research.github.io/zapbench

🧠🧪

ZAPBench evaluates how well different models can predict the activity of over 70,000 neurons in a novel larval zebrafish dataset.

google-research.github.io

Reposted by Auguste Schulz

Shervin Safavi @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social · Feb 20

Re-posting is appreciated: We have a fully funded PhD position in CMC lab @cmc-lab.bsky.social (at @tudresden_de). You can use forms.gle/qiAv5NZ871kv... to send your application and find more information. Deadline is April 30. Find more about CMC lab: cmclab.org and email me if you have questions.