ARNI at COSYNE2025: NeuroFM Workshop

ARNI postdoctoral fellows Mehdi Azabou and Cole Hurwitz are among the co-organizers of the workshop “Building a Foundation Model for the Brain: Datasets, Theory, and Models” at COSYNE. This workshop is bringing together experts who are at the forefront of neuro-foundation model research.

Learn more about the workshop: https://lnkd.in/eGGpp5sY

Workshop Summary:
Advances in neurotechnology have enabled the collection of large-scale neural recordings during animal behavior. To extract insights from these datasets, researchers are now faced with significant challenges when comparing data across different brain regions, subjects, and tasks. Inspired by recent successes in large-scale “foundation” modeling of natural language and computational biology, there has been a push towards developing “neuro-foundation models” that can be trained across diverse datasets and then fine-tuned for downstream tasks and analyses including neural encoding, decoding, cell-type classification, and activity prediction. In this workshop, we aim to provide an overview of current neuro-foundation model approaches and to bring together experimentalists, theoreticians, and model builders to discuss how this paradigm can lead to a deeper understanding of the brain. In particular, we plan to highlight the utility of neuro-foundation models in analyses across recording modalities, brain regions, individuals, species, and contexts. In addition to these talks, we will also host a panel to discuss challenges, opportunities, and risks of building these models.