Gabriel Béna 🌻
@solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
260 followers 350 following 57 posts
PhD Student at Imperial College with Dan Goodman. Pretending to be a neuro guy. Modularity, structure-function, resource-constrained ANNs/SNNs, neuromorphic + fun stuff like Neural Cellular Automatas 😎 Also working w/ SpiNNCloud on SpiNNaker2.
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Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
ferst60.bsky.social
Joseph Goebbels elevated Horst Wessel into a martyr for the Nazi Party and in 2025 The Trump Regime is doing the same with Charlie Kirk

open.substack.com/pub/mitchthe...
How the Nazis Turned Horst Wessel into a Propaganda Legend
Horst Wessel was not a man of virtue.
open.substack.com
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
quantamagazine.bsky.social
The cells of your body follow simple rules and play off one another to form a complete organism. The researcher Alexander Mordvintsev has developed “neural cellular automata,” building blocks that can self-assemble into any form. @georgemusser.com reports: www.quantamagazine.org/self-assembl...
Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of ‘Game of Life’ | Quanta Magazine
In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules.
www.quantamagazine.org
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
neural-reckoning.org
UK academics, be aware that what's happening to universities in the US is coming to us in a few years, in the (unfortunately quite likely) event that Reform wins.

Labour needs to get it's act together and give people a reason to vote for them.
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
neural-reckoning.org
Is anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪
Diagram of how the "collaborative modelling of the brain" (COMOB) project started. Starting material lead to group research or solo research, coming together in online workshops (monthly) in an iterative cycle, finishing with writing up together. The diagram is illustrated with colourful cartoon blob characters.
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
We'll be presenting this at #GECCO2025!! Come say hi if you're around ☀️
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
neural-reckoning.org
Almost last call to register for UK neural computation conference in London July 10-11. Registration deadline is July 1st. We have some great talks and posters as well as a session on funding with ARIA. 🤖🧠🧪

Look forward to seeing you all there. Now click here 👇

neuralcomputation.uk
A cartoon-style illustration of a brain and a computer having a conversation. The brain has eyes and a mouth, and is animated to look like it's talking. It says, 'Have you heard about this comp neuro thing happening at Imperial College?'. The computer has a friendly face on its screen and is replying, 'Yeah it's going to be pretty hot'.
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
marcelaiphan.bsky.social
Reportage bouleversant de Franceinfo sur les distributions alimentaires meurtrières de l’armée israélienne à Gaza.
Ne détournons pas le regard.
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
piperformissouri.bsky.social
No money for Medicaid or SNAP or museums or schools or sidewalks or gun violence prevention or art or libraries.

Always money for war.
solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
Was easy to guess Dan's least fav if you knew of his anarchist tendencies #CommunityOfMind 😁
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
neural-reckoning.org
Fusing multisensory signals across channels and time.

Now published at PLOS Comp Biol! 🎉 With @swathianil.bsky.social and @marcusghosh.bsky.social.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

TLDR, when multisensory signals vary over time, neural architecture becomes important. Biggest not always best.
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
marcelaiphan.bsky.social
Libérez Baptiste André
Libérez Reva Viard
Libérez Greta Thunberg
Libérez Rima Hassan
Libérez Suayb Ordu
Libérez Sergio Toribio
Libérez Mark van Rennes
Libérez Thiago Avila
Libérez Omar Faiad
Libérez Yanis Mhamdi
Libérez Pascal Maurieras
Libérez Yasemin Acar
#FreedomFlotilla
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
premthakker.bsky.social
In 2010, Israeli forces attacked a Gaza aid flotilla, killing 10 people. In the aftermath, the Obama administration blocked UN efforts for an investigation, Biden defended the attack, and Chuck Schumer condemned the United Nations and defended Israel.
Gaza Aid Ship Bombed, Echoing 2010 Flotilla Attack
"Today’s attack on our flotilla off the coast of Malta is not just an act of piracy—it’s a consequence of global complicity," a Freedom Flotilla Coalition organizer said.
zeteo.com
Reposted by Gabriel Béna 🌻
jlmelenchon.bsky.social
Se tenir prêt. Communiquer. Rima, Greta et le petit bateau anti blocus s'approche de la côte. Les commandos meurtriers de Netanyahu sont prêts à bondir.

#FreedomFlotilla
solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
We will also be present at GECCO 2025, specifically at the EvoSelf Workshop, to present this work :
evolving-self-organisation-workshop.github.io

See you there, I hope !
EvoSelf workshop, Gecco 2025
evolving-self-organisation-workshop.github.io
solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
In conclusion: continuous cellular automata could be universal computers when trained right. This might change how we should think about:

- What can compute ?
- How to design computers ?
- The future of efficient AI hardware.

🚀 Let's train physics-based computers !🚀
solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
Taking it even further: We're developing a graph-based "Hardware Meta-Network"!
Users define tasks as intuitive graphs (nodes = regions, edges = operations), and a GNN + coordinate-MLP generates the hardware configuration!
It's literally a compiler from human intent → NCA computation! 🤖
 Graph-based task representations and GNN-based hypernetwork for hardware generation
solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
I quite like this idea of a compiler ! Think of it like having dual timescale:

- FAST: State / neuronal dynamics (computation happens)
- SLOW: Hardware reconfiguration (program flow)

This separation mirrors classical computer architecture but within a continuous, differentiable substrate !
solarpunkgabs.bsky.social
Our approach also enables task composition, meaning we can chain operations together!
Example: Distribute matrix → Multiply → Rotate → Return to original position
It's like programming, but the "execution" is continuous dynamics! We're building a neural compiler!
Examples of an Out of Distribution Task: the NCA needs to distribute a matrix in all corners in a larger grid than the one seen during training.