Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Brad Aimone

@jbimaknee.bsky.social

570 followers 150 following 260 posts

Computational neuroscientist-in-exile; computational neuromorphic computing; putting neurons in HPC since 2011; dreaming of a day when AI will actually be brain-like.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 16d

We are trying hard to get Science Bluesky to the network effects of the good old days!

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 16d

Neuroscientists allowing other fields to define what details are relevant has been a total disaster. No other discipline would outsource a question of such great importance.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 17d

Machine learning is kind of a hack here, because it says "we can't actually define what language processing/image classification/etc is, but we can use data to give us that constraint. So let us just approximate this unknown function that we can't define well"

It works, but it is inefficient.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 17d

Incidentally, my personal favorite interpretation of advancements in computer science is that most of the progress we've made has been in defining the problems themselves. Many successes correlate to clearer definitions of what "good" means or abstracting the task away from weak definitions.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 17d

This is a great thread, and I think it hits on one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience that I hope NeuroAI can impact.

Until we can rigorously define what computations are occurring in the brain, we can't make any real progress in our functional understanding. We need constraints. 🧠🤖🧪

Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 17d

I once saw a (very interesting) talk about sleep in which the speaker started by saying that we don't really know how to define sleep, and then proceeded to operationalize sleep in flies as basically periods when they are still for a long time. This got me thinking...

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 17d

I wouldn't call myself a Markramian but I am most certainly an anti-Marrian. The Marr tradition has allowed cog sci and AI to ignore biology and biologists to ignore computation. So while we know a lot about AI and a lot about the biology, we know little about the Brain. It's been a total disaster.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 17d

I don't think it is quite a fair comparison. The vast majority of systems neuroscientists have been banging some version of the Marr drum for 50 years. Maybe a few dozen have really tried the Markram approach?

Take away Markram's personality clashes, I think the jury is out on that approach

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · 19d

I was amazed when I learned a few years ago that many English academics have an "at work accent" and a "relaxed at home around family and local friends accent" which is extremely different and that they can turn them on and off as needed.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Sep 7

Wikipedia, which is probably the best internet consolidation of science for the masses, is heavily biased at the edges towards those self-servicing scientists who want to hype themselves.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Sep 7

So clearly they shouldn't replicate and sell copyrighted material. But if you read my paper and incorporate that into your thinking, that isn't something you need to ask permission

Accessing illegally is a different story. But this isn't an assault on Science; I'd argue it is almost ideal...

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Sep 7

To be fair, isn't this why we publish? To get out ideas integrated into the universal human knowledge-base?

It would be far worse if Meta's AI was trained *without* your papers, wouldn't it be?

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 26

We put the FlyWire connectome on the Loihi 2 neuromorphic platform

🤖🧠🧪🪰

arxiv.org/abs/2508.16792

Neuromorphic Simulation of Drosophila Melanogaster Brain Connectome on Loihi 2

We demonstrate the first-ever nontrivial, biologically realistic connectome simulated on neuromorphic computing hardware. Specifically, we implement the whole-brain connectome of the adult Drosophila ...

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 25

We comp neuros can't make anyone happy can we?

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 25

I'm just bitter about all of the AI crowd and their strawman about planes not having feathers.

The modern AI approach would be to put a nuclear fueled engine on the back of that wooden airplane. And then condescendingly mock neuroscientists by saying the wings aren't actually important either.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 25

Yeah, models don't have to be perfect. But details aren't inherently bad, they just may not be relevant to your task and may be needed elsewhere

We see this acutely in AI. Turns out the brain's details weren't that important for image classification. So now we have LLMs that are 1,000,000x too big.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 25

So the value function often becomes something like "simpler is better" or "focus on what you understand" which are orthogonal concepts to "important for the brain"

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 25

This is always a dangerous point when it comes to the brain, as this assumes you have a clear and proper objective function

My opinion is that we have little idea what flight even means for neural computation, so we have little basis on determining which details are important.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 17

We aren't that far removed from neuroscientists celebrating the perceived failure of the Human Brain Project and its computational goals.

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 15

I'm not sure, there is definitely a similarity between neuromorphic and FPGAs in terms of how algorithms should be represented but I don't know much about the theory around FPGAs

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 15

From a serial complexity on a conventional platform I think you're right. For a true event driven data flow architecture like neuromorphic, I don't think there should have to be a program counter or similar (there isn't a program per se). Not sure what is really under the hood on today's platforms

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 15

Sitting at the ModSim meeting this week, it is clear that every other scientific field has benefited more from advanced computing than neuroscience. Those of us who have tried to do large scale modeling know who has been dismissive in the past. The lack of serious computing in neuro is neuro's fault

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 15

An interesting comment and discussion that gets to the deeper question of whether NeuroAI is a move towards something new or repackaging of old tired approaches with a shiny AI paint job.

Doug Crawford @jdcrawford.bsky.social · Aug 14

This statement is frustrating because systems neuroscientists (e.g. @gunnarblohm.bsky.social) have spent many years trying to build biologically realistic, mechanistic network models that are largely ignored outside a small community. And now NeuroAI is going to discover this is important?

Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · Aug 8

“NeuroAI should not remain limited to learning statistical relationships, but should also help in building mechanistic and causal models of neural activity. These models will incorporate biological properties of neural circuits, including cellular characteristics and network properties.”

💯💯💯

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 13

Traffic in Seattle is really bad...

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 12

I worry that serious neuroscientists avoid "emotion" as a rigorous area of study because it seems too close to the quack scientists who fight about consciousness

Yet emotion is central to the major neural health challenges we face as a society. People aren't on SSRIs because their V2 is misbehaving

Brad Aimone @jbimaknee.bsky.social · Aug 10

You can get really good store guac at a few places in Texas. Sometimes safer than buying avocados which can be random.

I feel this way though about all pasta sauces. A clove of garlic and a can of tomatoes makes a better marinara than any jarred stuff