Cole Hurwitz
@colehurwitz.bsky.social
1.2K followers 520 following 65 posts
Comp neuroscientist. Postdoc at Zuckerman Institute and IBL. Co-creator of SpikeInterface. Developing foundation models for the brain.
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colehurwitz.bsky.social
Thrilled to share our state-of-the-art method for in vivo cell-type classification and brain region localization, NEMO, which is now now a spotlight at @iclr-conf.bsky.social !

We use NEMO to characterize the electrophysiological diversity of cell-types across the entire mouse brain. 🐭 🧪 🧠
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
marcustriplett.bsky.social
Very happy for this to finally be published! We developed new machine learning methods for scalable mapping of synaptic connectivity using holographic optogenetics and compressed sensing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
bryanlimy.bsky.social
We present our preprint on ViV1T, a transformer for dynamic mouse V1 response prediction. We reveal novel response properties and confirm them in vivo.

With @wulfdewolf.bsky.social, Danai Katsanevaki, @arnoonken.bsky.social, @rochefortlab.bsky.social.

Paper and code at the end of the thread!

🧵1/7
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
intlbrainlab.bsky.social
Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in ‪@Nature.com‬:
🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0
🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Excited to co-organize our NeurIPS 2025 workshop on Foundation Models for the Brain and Body!
We welcome work across ML, neuroscience, and biosignals — from new approaches to large-scale models. Submit your paper or demo! 🧠 🧪 🦾
mehdiazabou.bsky.social
Excited to announce the Foundation Models for the Brain and Body workshop at #NeurIPS2025! 🧠📈 🧪

We invite short papers or interactive demos on AI for neural, physiological or behavioral data.

Submit by Aug 22 👉 brainbodyfm-workshop.github.io
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
mehdiazabou.bsky.social
Excited to announce the Foundation Models for the Brain and Body workshop at #NeurIPS2025! 🧠📈 🧪

We invite short papers or interactive demos on AI for neural, physiological or behavioral data.

Submit by Aug 22 👉 brainbodyfm-workshop.github.io
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Neural Encoding and Decoding at Scale (NEDS) is now accepted to @icmlconf.bsky.social as a spotlight (top 2.6%)! 🧠 🧪
colehurwitz.bsky.social
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. 🐀
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Super cool. 😀 Exciting to see the practical use cases of electrical stimulation for treating neurological disorders
auditorynerves.bsky.social
A trial will try to treat tinnitus in people who have only just developed persistent ringing or buzzing in the ears.

Newcastle University researchers funded by the American Tinnitus Association will use electrical brain stimulation & sound therapy.
🧪🧠👂🏼 #neuroskyence
www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...
Newcastle University trial to tackle tinnitus before it takes hold
The Newcastle study gives both electrical stimulus and sound therapy to people with early tinnitus.
www.bbc.co.uk
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
evatelzer.bsky.social
We’re hiring postdocs to join my lab at UNC. If you’re interested in adolescence, brain, and social development, DM me. Our work incorporates fMRI, social media, and longitudinal methods. We study risks and opportunities in adolescence. If you’re at #SRCD2025 and want to meet, please reach out!
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
francois.fleuret.org
I asked "on the other platform" what were the most important improvements to the original 2017 transformer.

That was quite popular and here is a synthesis of the responses:
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Whoever is at the @iclr-conf.bsky.social workshops, feel free to reach out to meet! Looking for fun neuro conversations since there aren’t any neuro workshops 😢
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
mehdiazabou.bsky.social
Scaling models across multiple animals was a major step toward building neuro-foundation models; the next frontier is enabling multi-task decoding to expand the scope of training data we can leverage.

Excited to share our #ICLR2025 Spotlight paper introducing POYO+ 🧠

poyo-plus.github.io

🧵
POYO+
POYO+: Multi-session, multi-task neural decoding from distinct cell-types and brain regions
poyo-plus.github.io
colehurwitz.bsky.social
It’s been great working with you 😄
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Eva Dyer, Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, and Liam Paninski (ran out of characters!)
colehurwitz.bsky.social
This work was led by @hanyu42.bsky.social who tirelessly worked to make this possible. In collaboration with Hanrui Lyu, Ethan Yixun Xu, @mostsquares.bsky.social, @kenjilee.bsky.social, Fan Yang, Andrew M. Shelton, Shawn Olsen, Sahar Minavi, Olivier Winter, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, and
Han Yu (@hanyu42.bsky.social)
Ph.D. student at Columbia Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
hanyu42.bsky.social
colehurwitz.bsky.social
We are still working on the codebase and aim to release a tool soon that users can download, fine-tune, and apply to their own datasets!
colehurwitz.bsky.social
We evaluate NEMO on brain region localization by predicting the region of individual neurons (and nearby groups) using only the extracted features, and compare it to baseline methods.

NEMO again outperforms both the VAE-based and supervised approaches.
colehurwitz.bsky.social
We scale NEMO to the full IBL Brain-Wide Map dataset: 675 insertions from over 100 animals, yielding 37,017 high-quality neurons.

Without using any labels, NEMO's features align closely with anatomical regions and are consistent across labs.
colehurwitz.bsky.social
We benchmark NEMO against two SOTA cell-type classification methods, PhysMAP and a VAE (Beau et al., 2025), using two optotagged datasets from the mouse cerebellum and visual cortex.

NEMO outperforms all baselines, including fully supervised models, with minimal fine-tuning.
colehurwitz.bsky.social
We construct a paired dataset of spike trains and waveforms for all neurons, transforming spiking activity into an ACG image (Beau et al., 2025) that captures autocorrelation across firing rates.

NEMO is trained to align ACGs and waveforms in a shared embedding space.
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Building on current multimodal cell-type classification methods (Lee et al. 2024 and Beau et al. 2025), we introduce a contrastive learning method for spiking activity and extracellular waveforms called NEMO. 🐟

Paper: Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=10J...
Website: ibl-nemo.github.io
In vivo cell-type and brain region classification via multimodal...
Current electrophysiological approaches can track the activity of many neurons, yet it is usually unknown which cell-types or brain areas are being recorded without further molecular or...
openreview.net
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Thrilled to share our state-of-the-art method for in vivo cell-type classification and brain region localization, NEMO, which is now now a spotlight at @iclr-conf.bsky.social !

We use NEMO to characterize the electrophysiological diversity of cell-types across the entire mouse brain. 🐭 🧪 🧠
Reposted by Cole Hurwitz
carandinilab.net
Agreed! But here's a note of caution: in the brain, different behavioral contexts can engage completely different neurons! Julie Lee in our lab published this in 2022 (and I'm still digesting the implications).
"Task specificity in mouse parietal cortex"
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Redirecting
doi.org
colehurwitz.bsky.social
Wow, this is fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
colehurwitz.bsky.social
This point is really important. We will need to train models across diverse behavioral contexts, rather than over-interpreting results from a single experimental setup or task!