Dan Goodman

I'm a computational neuroscientist and science reformer. I'm based at Imperial College London. I like to build things and organisations, including the Brian spiking neural network simulator, Neuromatch and the SNUFA spiking neural network community.

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npub1pmxyaxv6dm8xnd99c80fqyvtjmsmp68gv026tdyfsyz4000ttk0s48q5qg

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neuralreckoning_at_neuromatch.social@mostr.pub

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Last Notes

2025-04-05 21:00:21

Parakeets on Hampstead Heath. #photography
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/114/287/362/170/051/717/original/4cd13b47f2fb4c7c.jpeg

2024-11-14 00:35:29

Does anyone else get stuck in reactive mode when you have too many things to deal with, only reacting as things come at you rather than having your own plan about what you want to do? Tips for escaping this?

2024-10-30 17:29:27

The #SNUFA24 final program is out and the event is next Tue-Wed! If you love spiking neural networks, click on the link below to check it out and register (free).
https://snufa.net/2024/
Day 1:
Chiara Bartolozzi, IIT Genova (invited)
Karim Habashy
Adapting to time: why nature chose to evolve a diverse set of neurons
Matteo Saponati
A feedback control algorithm for online learning in Spiking Neural Networks and Neuromorphic devices
Christian Machens, Champalimaud (invited)
William Podlaski
Storing overlapping associative memories on latent manifolds in low-rank spiking networks
Flash talks
Day 2
David Kappel, University of Bochum (invited)
Filippo Moro
On the role of temporal hierarchy in Spiking Neural Networks
Rainer Engelken
Using Dynamical Systems Theory to Improve Surrogate Gradient Learning in Spiking Neural Networks
Anna Levina, Uni Tübingen (invited)
Ulaş İbrahim Ayyılmaz
Excitatory and inhibitory neurons exhibit distinct roles for task learning, temporal scaling, and working memory in recurrent spiking neural network models of neocortex
Veronika Koren
Efficient encoding, transmission and transformation of sensory features in a multilayer spiking network
https://media.neuromatch.social/media_attachments/files/113/397/553/432/003/976/original/29dc79f52f841ac1.jpg

2024-09-19 23:33:41

People are saying that by his cruelty to pensioners and saying he'll keep on taking bribes, that Starmer has miscalculated. I'm not sure. He's shown the billionaires that they come first and he can be bought, and he's calculating they'll remember and we'll forget. Let's remember!

2024-09-06 10:53:02

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@npub1fe9…dfzt 😞

2024-09-06 05:50:57

Hopefully that's it for Macron and his party. It was always obvious that it was a Thatcherite attempt to destroy the left and the idea of solidarity in France. The fact that they're willing to ally with the fascists to keep out a democratically elected left should be an action they can never recover from.

2024-09-04 22:19:43

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@npub1cj9…yftt I dutifully reply each time with this link:
http://neural-reckoning.org/reviewing.html
Quite a few editors have replied and said they agree with me but feel they have to do it for their career.

2024-09-03 08:55:37

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@npub1w9e…0cvv ah interesting, so you think it's not sensor noise, just the natural bounce up and down as I run? I'll try that!

2024-09-03 08:50:34

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@npub106k…aq7w but how is it calculating that? Presumably they don't release their source code.

2024-09-02 23:02:20

Data analysis question. How can I compute my total ascent from Google fit location data of my run? It's quite noisy so sum(relu(diff(height))) massively overestimates. I can smooth but what's the right width? I don't know the distribution of sensor noise and it might depend on all sorts of uncontrollable factors. This feels like someone must have definitively solved this? Another option would be to project my lat/long (which seems much less noisy) onto a global height map and use that to replace Google elevation sensor, although maybe that smooths too much?

2024-09-01 12:12:16

I was just thinking about ordering a burrito and saw that there's a restaurant selling roast beef and yorkshire pudding wraps as "yorkshire burrito"... #BritishFusion?

2024-08-30 13:21:08

The EU just emailed to let me know they've updated the "Country Correction Coefficients" for Sweden from 125.4% to 125%.

2024-08-23 22:31:56

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@npub1sy9…hnku this was such a weird and obviously wrong decision even at the time. However did they all vote in favour of that?

2024-08-17 20:44:37

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@npub17nd…77sr the required collective action is to stop submitting papers to journals and do open preprint review only.

2024-07-24 10:46:09

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@npub1ssl…7yz4 let's do a poll! 🤣

2024-07-24 00:17:03

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@npub1sky…2hts so you don't think the media campaign against him was an incredibly successful interference operation?

2024-07-24 00:12:56

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@npub1sky…2hts weren't you arguing with me about how terrible Corbyn was just a year or so ago? 😉

2024-07-22 23:12:42

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@npub1sky…2hts I occasionally misuse them in my python code for various things because they're so easy to generate in python. I could imagine it somehow happening with a typo in a variable.

2024-07-22 22:24:36

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@npub1sky…2hts what a delicious mystery. Bug in a bit of code that randomly replaces words and phrases to avoid plagiarism detectors?

2024-07-22 12:35:41

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@npub1ssl…7yz4 and I'm sorry that Australia always ends up getting a raw deal. It's hard to say no to the time slot that works for Europe and the US. 😞

2024-07-22 12:34:26

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@npub1ssl…7yz4 absolutely! Check out our YouTube channel for our back catalogue.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL09WqqDbQWHFoXyLxIxoblfO7SSQcCAZ-&si=-9I_JYai5MeFaHHK

2024-07-22 09:33:02

Could we decide if a simulated spiking neural network uses spike timing or not? Given that we have full access to the state of the network and can simulate perturbations. Ideas for how we could decide? Would everyone agree? #neuroscience #SpikingNeuralNetworks #computationalneuroscience #compneuro

2024-07-20 10:07:28

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@npub1p69…fac6 some will, some won't. Good idea to get some intros out of the way before.

2024-07-19 22:39:04

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@npub1xna…eyvs and then when you are trying to find something you know you saw in that newsletter 6 months ago and find that the link tracking service expired those links. 😡

2024-07-19 20:35:21

Thoughts on good ways to structure small group in person scientific workshops to maximise the value? Thinking that it would be useful to have a back and forth agenda setting process by email starting over a month or two in advance, and then a small number of focussed discussions based on that. #science #academicchatter #academia

2024-07-18 21:37:49

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@npub14d7…dm4s finally! 🎉

2024-07-16 18:19:29

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@npub16c6…s5g8 oh that game looks like hell. I love watching speedruns. Such an incredible amount of skill in such an eclectic niche. Do we need to invent science speedruns?

2024-07-15 17:37:54

Two year old's lies are the best. Found my daughter putting on roller skates after I said no, and she looked at me sweetly and said "It's not roller skates! It's.... something. It's.... watermelon I think."

2024-07-15 17:11:17

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@npub1a7m…j0p9 Good luck! Some are trying out a few experimental things, very slowly and cautiously.

2024-07-15 16:14:59

Maybe it was inevitable that I would end up interested in spike trains with Siméon Poisson as my PhD great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent.
https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=124909
And just a few steps up the tree, Lagrange, Laplace, Euler, Bernoulli, d'Alembert. Fun website.

2024-07-15 09:44:06

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@npub17nd…77sr but just think how much value they're going to add!

2024-07-14 11:32:24

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@npub14d7…dm4s it really pains me but Mozilla leadership the last few years really seem dedicated to cementing its irrelevance. 😞 If and when they manage to kill it off, I will mourn it.

2024-07-13 16:02:29

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@npub1m7h…sn57 I feel like that one's true at every election. Right wing candidates not held to account for anything.

2024-07-13 13:09:25

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@npub1m7h…sn57 same in that it was a valid concern that wasn't acted on, for a candidate that then ended up losing the election? 😉

2024-07-13 08:40:26

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@npub14d7…dm4s fwiw if it were me deciding, this reasoning would count for a lot. Your efforts are really recognised by some of us.

2024-07-12 16:20:26

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@npub1twh…5j6z Goodman, Dan reacted to your post. ⭐
Also, I appreciate the hashtag.

2024-07-07 20:17:03

Ah the photos of disappointed fascists holding empty wine glasses ready for the champagne are just 👌.

2024-07-07 19:41:05

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@npub1jzg…hc3a evergreen post. 😉

2024-07-07 18:30:28

What a relief. Well done France.

2024-07-05 07:36:10

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@npub1jzg…hc3a and by a large majority. Very happy.

2024-07-04 21:09:24

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@npub1twh…5j6z can confirm fireworks in London right now. 😂

2024-07-04 21:08:44

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There are fireworks right now in London! Happy 4th of July.

2024-07-04 14:56:41

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@npub1twh…5j6z now that is an excellent hashtag to be following today, thanks for making me aware of it!

2024-07-04 14:06:19

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I wonder if there'll be fireworks when the exit poll is announced at 10pm?

2024-07-04 13:23:54

Hey I just realised that both the UK and the US are today celebrating the end of being oppressed by a British government.

2024-07-04 08:45:18

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@npub1qv5…zjg3 terrible idea! This gives publishers and their commercial interests even more power over science.

2024-07-04 07:57:39

Get out there and vote my UK friends! Make it tactical. If you're somewhere the Tories have a chance, vote whoever has the best chance to displace them. In a seat that has no chance of the Tories getting in, maybe vote Green to try to exert some leftward pressure on Lab/LibDem.

2024-07-03 23:20:08

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@npub1jzg…hc3a it's very challenging, and I wouldn't recommend for an early career researcher, unfortunately. Would put you at a big disadvantage. 😞

2024-07-03 22:35:33

Every time I turn down an opportunity for an event in the USA, I feel a sense of regret. Then I go and look up the carbon emissions, and you know what, it wasn't worth 1,800kg of CO2 released into the upper atmosphere after all.

2024-07-03 12:07:57

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@npub15m4…kq97 yeah I'm worried about that too. If Labour fails to achieve anything good in the next 5 years - a distinct possibility - the next election could be a really bad one

2024-07-03 09:03:25

Despite feeling very unenthused by the incoming Labour government, there's something light and special about the anticipation of today. Tomorrow we rid ourselves of the Tories after 14 awful years. If we're lucky, permanently.

2024-07-02 15:05:01

Brilliant article from Quanta Magazine about a successful bottom-up collaborative effort organised online to solve a long standing mathematical challenge. I think this sort of thing will be an increasingly important part of research in the future.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/amateur-mathematicians-find-fifth-busy-beaver-turing-machine-20240702/

2024-06-30 18:42:24

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@npub1jzg…hc3a You've achieved more than I ever did with them! 😂

2024-06-30 16:38:56

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@npub1jzg…hc3a BBC's France reporting is awful.

2024-06-06 01:22:55

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@npub14d7…dm4s oh damn, ok well even if I don't use it for this, that's cool enough that I'm clearly going to have to play with semantic mediawiki at some point.

2024-06-06 01:18:16

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@npub14d7…dm4s is that a graph query language or something?

2024-06-06 01:17:42

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@npub14d7…dm4s oh that's awesome!

2024-06-06 01:05:40

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@npub14d7…dm4s what would the workflow look like for something like selecting all people with one tag and listing their other tags into a table, or other visualisation, for example?

2024-06-06 00:18:22

Possibly a weird question. Do any academics use software to keep track of their network of colleagues, to make it easy to answer questions like "if I want to ask someone I know about X, then who should it be?" I'm terrible at keeping track of this stuff in my head. #AcademicChatter

2024-05-08 09:10:19

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@npub14d7…dm4s I don't think it's just the publishing system but it's surely an unhealthy combination!

2024-03-23 22:13:28

Asimov's first Foundation novel has a wonderful scene that I think prefigures the LLM arms race we're going through at the moment. A bunch of characters are using formal mathematical tools to analyse the meaning of verbose and seemingly eloquent political statements:
"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Hoik, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications - in short, all the goo and dribble - he
found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

2024-03-15 22:05:29

"If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell [scientists] they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bullk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover." - David Grabber, The Utopia of Rules.

2024-03-12 12:58:11

I'm thinking about a new way of interviewing candidates for a PhD. The idea would be to assume they're smart and competent, take their research proposal and do a 1h brainstorming session role-playing the first week of the PhD. Good idea? Could it introduce biases? Improvements?

2024-03-01 20:54:00

John Nash's paper "Equilibrium points in n-person games" is 350 words and has been cited over 11,000 times. Is there any paper with a higher citation to word count ratio?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.36.1.48

2024-02-13 10:09:07

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@npub1twh…5j6z you can try to do it this way (and it's a good thing), but it has limits. Firstly not everyone does. Lots of lab heads treat the more junior people in their lab as their employees to give orders to. But even if you try to be a benevolent dictator, everyone is still aware who has the power, no? Assuming you're not able to give lifetime jobs to people, they're going to be relying on you for many things, like job renewal, or championing them in terms of publications, introductions and references for future jobs, etc.

2024-02-11 20:29:32

So parents of Mastodon, we all do that thing where we're so tired and sleep deprived that we fall asleep while reading a story to one of our children, only to wake up and realise that even though you were asleep your brain was still reading out loud? And that because you were asleep you weren't reading the actual story but just improvising some complete gibberish that the child was totally happy with? It's not just me, right?

2024-02-05 01:41:56

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1sy9…hnku but what are they supposed to do if they can't pay? Submit to another journal? No guarantees it will work out and anyway the extra time and possibly less appropriate journal means they're at a disadvantage compared to richer researchers. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with saying that someone who doesn't take this route is a bad guy.

2024-02-05 00:23:48

Is offering to add random people as authors on a paper - in order to share and thus reduce publication costs - fraud or a valid response to excessive publication costs and broken performance metrics?
(Not planning to do this myself btw, I'm fortunate enough not to need to, but not everyone is so lucky.)
Cc @npub1sy9…hnku

2024-01-13 23:05:27

#Consciousness question from someone who read #philosophy stuff on this years ago but nothing from #neuroscience. Is it generally understood to be a memory phenomenon? It seems logically that it must be (see below), but that's not the way the philosophy stuff I have read about it discussed it.
My argument is that the only thing we could be talking about if we're talking consciousness is things that have made their way into a specific memory subsystem (the ones that are accessible to our language systems), otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about it. Similarly, anything that has made its way into that memory subsystem would also be something we were conscious of. In other words, consciousness is just the set of things that go into that subsystem.
So is consciousness just the study of some particular memory subsystem and the way it interacts with other systems like language? And if we don't understand how memory works, can we understand anything about consciousness?

2024-01-02 23:43:43

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@npub1twh…5j6z @npub1jzg…hc3a oh no, don't get me wrong. He's definitely much better than the Tories. But he's better in the sense of things will get worse more slowly and not in the sense of things will get better. He's just recently said he wants more privatisation of the NHS for example.

2024-01-01 23:26:25

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@npub1jzg…hc3a there's a latest date but it's often done earlier than that. This lot might hang around to the last minute though and do as much damage as they can because they'll probably be out of power for a long time. Corbyn gone unfortunately. Destroyed by billionaire right wing press. New leader of the party is a bland centre right nothing. About the only interesting thing one can say about him is that he lied about every single one of the pledges he made in the leadership election. He won't do anything much and if he does it probably won't be good.

2024-01-01 22:19:40

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@npub1jzg…hc3a they'll be gone at the next election which might even be this year. Unfortunately our "left wing" party isn't much better these days.

2023-10-09 13:56:00

I'm happy to announce the start of a new free and open online course on neuroscience for people with a machine learning or similar background, co-developed by @npub12mu…glrf. YouTube videos and Jupyter-based exercises will be released weekly. There is a Discord for discussions.
For more details about the structure of the course, and to watch the first video "Why neuroscience?" go straight to the course website:
https://neuro4ml.github.io
Currently available are videos for "week 0" and exercises for "week 1", but more coming soon.
Why did I create this course? Well, I think both neuroscience and ML can be enriched by knowing about each other and my feeling is that a general purpose intro to neuro or comp-neuro isn't the right way to inspire people in ML to be interested in neuro.
I hear a lot about neuroscience inspiring AI, but I think there's understandable scepticism about that from ML people. I don't want people to take neuro ideas and apply directly to ML, I just think we get a richer picture of what both fields are doing if we think more widely.
In other words, we should be thinking that we are somehow studying the same problem in different ways. You see that in the early history of the field, and it's very inspiring. (Yes, this is pretty much just saying that cognitive science is cool, but my scope is a bit narrower.)
The focus then is not on how neuroscientists think the brain works, but on the mechanisms the brain uses. These are strange, inspiring, and often their contribution to intelligent behaviour is still deeply mysterious.
The first video of the main part, on the structure of neurons, finishes with recent research (from @npub17ft…pj4x and @npub1apg…f07c among others) on what the function of dendritic structure might be. No answers, just ideas.
And that's going to be another key part of this course. Research level problems are not hard to find in neuroscience, and the aim of this course is to empower students with the tools to start finding and working on them straight away.
Most of the exercises in the course won't have correct answers. They're starting points for further investigation. We'll be downloading and exploring open neuroscience datasets using methods from computational neuroscience and ML.
The course is not supposed to be comprehensive. It's a short course and the aim is more to get inspired and start on a longer road. I'd expect everyone to get something different out of it, and I'm happy if for some people their take home is "neuroscience is not for me"!
In some ways, it's the course I would have liked to get me into neuroscience and for my incoming PhD students from non-neuro backgrounds to be able to take. It's personal, and full of the sort of stuff that inspires me to be interested in neuroscience.
Well, I hope that some of you might be interested to follow along in the next few weeks, and since it's the first time I'm giving this course please do give feedback by email, Discord or however you like. Also, please feel free to re-use materials however you like.
#neuroscience #compneuro #machinelearning #ML
https://neuromatch.social/system/media_attachments/files/111/205/398/567/289/233/original/e11b31638ce76c30.png

2023-10-06 12:59:36

What neuroscience / comp neuro papers would you put on a recommended reading list if you wanted to emphasise the creativity, inspiration and joy of the field? I think some suggestions would overlap with the most famous or epochal papers, but some might be quite different.
#neuroscience #compneuro

2023-09-01 11:43:31

I'm currently developing a new course "Neuroscience for machine learners" that I hope to be able to make publicly available, and I'd love to hear what you think should be in it.
It's aimed at people with a machine learning background to learn a bit about neuroscience. My thinking is that neuroscience and ML have had fruitful links in the past, and may again in the future (although right now they're drifting apart). This course is designed to give students the background they'd need to be able to discover, understand and make use of new opportunities arising from neuroscience (if they do). I'm not trying to tell them only about the bits of neuroscience that we already think are applicable to ML, but to give them enough background to read and understand enough neuroscience to allow them to make new discoveries about what might be applicable to ML. The constraint is that it can't just be an intro to neuro course I think, because I'm not sure how compelling that would be to students with an ML focus. The course is 10 weeks and will have quite a practical focus, with most of the attention on weekly coding based exploratory group work rather than lectures. (Similar to @npub1e6k…ct64 Academy.)
I have thoughts about what should be on this course, but I'd love to know what you all think would be most relevant.
#neuroscience #compneuro #machinelearning #ai