Newsletter
arni-institute.org
April 2, 2024
Upcoming Events

You can find any upcoming seminars and events on ARNI's website, https://arni-institute.org/events/. 

Data Science Day
April 4: Data Science Day 2024 presented by the Data Science Institute from 8am to 5pm
Register Here
Data Science Day
"Whole-body simulation of the realistic fruit fly locomotion with deep reinforcement learning"
"Whole-body simulation of the realistic fruit fly locomotion with deep reinforcement learning"
April 12: Animal Behavior Video Analysis Working Group presents Srini Turaga, PhD, Group Leader from HHMI Janelia Research Campus at 3pm in Zuckerman Institute, 3227 Broadway, Conf room: L3-079
Breakthrough Technologies
April 15: Breakthrough Technologies: Quantum Computing & AI Panel, ARNI in partnership with the New York Hall of Science and Columbia Engineering School will be hosting it's first major panel. This panel invites Dario Gil, SVP and Director of Research at IBM and Xaq Pitkow, Associate Director of ARNI and Associate Professor of the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon, to discuss the current state of quantum computing and AI. Furthermore, Jeannette Wing, EVPR and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, will be moderating this enthralling conversation around the scientific possibilities created by AI. (Invitation Only)
Breakthrough Technologies
Faculty Position Available
The Department of Neurosurgery at UT Health Houston invites applications for a McNair Foundation Endowed Scholarship in Neuroscience and Neural engineering at the McGovern Medical School. A multiyear $2.8 million endowment will support a highly-talented scientist or engineer with skills in advanced approaches to neural decoding, brain machine interfaces, computational neuroscience and/or wireless system design for neural prostheses. The appointee may receive additional research support based on seniority and prior accomplishments and will also be eligible for a STARS award from the University of Texas System for instrument and infrastructure support.
 
How to apply
Please send cv and a brief outline of a research statement to Nitin Tandon, Professor, Department of Neurosurgery, VP Neuroscience Strategy and Development at UT Health - nitin.tandon@uth.tmc.edu
***Highlights***

Animal Behavior Video Analysis Working Group
On March 22nd, ARNI- UPenn faculty, Jianbo Shi, visited Columbia to give a fascinating talk entitled:

Brain Decodes Deep Nets

Abstract: We developed a surprising usage of brain encoding: using a brain fMRI prediction model to draw a picture of how a deep net processes information onto a brain. Our tool provides a detailed analysis of large pre-trained vision models by mapping them onto the brain, thus exposing their hidden layers and channels.  Our results show how different training methods matter: they lead to remarkable differences in hierarchical organization and scaling behavior. It also provides insight into finetuning: how large pre-trained models change when adapting to new datasets.

The Spring 2024 Special Issue of AI Magazine entitled "Beneficial AI" from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) highlights the broad research activities of the National Science Foundation (NSF)  and USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture funded AI Research Institutes.

The cover image was generated by Midjourney, responding to a prompt that included notions of, “people from various professions (teachers, nurses, farmers, engineers, and artists), working together to create and guide AI to facilitate collaboration, innovation, and problem-solving for the common good.” While this is a challenging concept for man or machine to represent in a single image, this issue’s articles describing the U.S. National AI Research Institutes will paint richer portraits!

ARNI Updates

ARNI Linkedin
Please join our ARNI Linkedin page and stay connected with us. We will be posting our events and activities on this page as ARNI continues to support its faculty and partners in AI and neuroscience breakthrough research. 

ARNI Club
We have started! Get ready for some innovative and creative activities to come from the ARNI graduate students and postdoctorate fellows.

Benjamin Eyre (Richard Zemel group at Columbia), Katherine Xu (Jianbo Shi group at UPenn), and Dongrui Deng (Xaq Pitkow group at Carnegie Mellon) have graciously volunteered to spearhead the ARNI Club. 

We are calling for 1 more graduate student who is interested to lead the club (for a period of 6 months), ideally one from the Zuckerman Institute.

NeuroAI Tutorial Building
ARNI is co-developing a new NeuroAI course with Neuromatch Academy. Our Associate Director, Xaq Pitkow, is leading the effort with this project and asks for some urgent short-term help. “We're trying to build a few tutorials on how microcircuits provide a useful inductive bias. One of these tutorials is about attention in brains and machines. The perspective I’d like to offer is how attention serves to change the graph of what neurons (or variables) interact with others, like this tutorial. Would anyone be available and willing to help out? It’s for a great cause, and you’d be credited with content creation for what should be wide dissemination”! Please contact Xaq Pitkow at xaq@cmu.edu or reach out to us for more information.  
Neuromatch Academy
Reminders

Please fill out ARNI’s demographic survey: 
https://seas.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_389MBAs7tPell5Q

Free NSF computational resources for ARNI- ACCESS
Please consider opening accounts with NSF-sponsored ACCESS system providing free computational resources. You will readily be approved (within 24 hours) for EXPLORE or DISCOVER tiers. NSF does not encourage use of ACCELERATE unless there is a depleted DISCOVER allocation before. It can take a few weeks for an ACCELERATE application to be approved.

You will need to add the following information under the grant support section:

Grant Title: AI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence
PI Name: Richard Zemel
Begin Date: 06/01/2023 
End Date: 05/31/2028
Grant Number: 2229929
Is this grant pending? No
Select a field of science: (add your field)
Awarded Amount: 20 million 
Percentage of Supporting Grant that will be applied to the research on ACCESS Allocated Resources: 1%
Program Officer Name: Raghavachari, Sridhar
Program Officer Email: sraghava@nsf.gov

We would like to highlight ARNI achievements in future newsletters. Please share with us your events, papers, presentation, or any news you want to share with the ARNI community!