Rory Byrne
Neuroscience PhD student, Cambridge UK. Confused but excited.
"Everything around me was somebody's lifework"
👋 https://rory.bio
🔧 compmotifs.com
- Reposted by Rory ByrneToy models, just in time for Christmas! Excited to share my first article for @thetransmitter.bsky.social #neuroskyence
- Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
- I built a link-sharing discussion website for (meta)science. talk.amacrin.com Scientific discourse here and elsewhere is a bit fragmented, so I made a space for centralised, casual discussion. You can log in with Bsky. Still in testing mode. I'll move it to a new domain once I find a good name.
- Answer: because seniors know the language of software architecture. This enriches their LLM prompting significantly. If you want to successfully use AI for coding, learn some software architecture!
- AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly Make Seniors Stronger? | Discussion
- Proud to have been a part of this, a great example of distributed async science! Huge thanks to @marcusghosh.bsky.social, @neuralreckoning.bsky.social, @tfiers.bsky.social, @krhab.bsky.social and others for putting in the bulk effort 🙌
- A great piece from @ersatzben.bsky.social on the importance of bold, aesthetic, mission-oriented directions in publicly funded research. betterscienceproject.substack.com/p/the-counte...
- Reposted by Rory ByrneHow can we best use AI in science? Myself and 9 other research fellows from @imperial-ix.bsky.social use AI methods in domains from plant biology (🌱) to neuroscience (🧠) and particle physics (🎇). Together we suggest 10 simple rules @plos.org 🧵 doi.org/10.1371/jour...
- Reposted by Rory ByrneNew preprint for #neuromorphic and #SpikingNeuralNetwork folk (with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social). arxiv.org/abs/2507.16043 Surrogate gradients are popular for training SNNs, but some worry whether they really learn complex temporal spike codes. TLDR: we tested this, and yes they can! 🧵👇 🤖🧠🧪
- Reposted by Rory Byrne🟢 Applications are now open for two SSI Fellows' events: Niko Sirmpilatze's "Animals in Motion" and Alessandro Felder's "Big Imaging Data". These events will take place during the NIU Open Software Week running between Monday 11 and Friday 15 August in London. www.software.ac.uk/news/ssi-fel...
- Reposted by Rory ByrneHow do babies and blind people learn to localise sound without labelled data? We propose that innate mechanisms can provide coarse-grained error signals to boostrap learning. New preprint from @yang-chu.bsky.social. 🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2001.10605
- Come build tools for science with us in London! Food, cool people, great speakers (on both the science and toolmaking sides). #neuroskyence #openscience #desci #openchem #bioinformatics #opensource #foss
- Following our successful SF event, we (www.compmotifs.com) are running another hackathon! When? 7-8 June. Where? London, UK. Who? Builders and researchers from academia and industry. What? Develop innovative computational tools to advance the natural sciences. Join us: lu.ma/apsqlxlj?utm....
- Reposted by Rory ByrneHow can we explore the space of computational models in #neuroscience 🧠? Picture a mouse navigating an environment with light and dark areas. 🧵1/10
- If you’re in SF, come build tools-for-science with us later this month! 🛠️ #opensource #neuroskyence #openscience #machinelearning #compchem #chemsky
- We (www.compmotifs.com) are coming to SF! Together with Pebblebed, we’re hosting a 2-day hackathon on 26-27 March for builders and scientists across disciplines to build new methods and tools for the computational and natural sciences. Join us: lu.ma/t5yik06g. Reposts will be much appreciated!
- Reposted by Rory ByrneJust getting started @standupforscience.bsky.social
- Reposted by Rory ByrneScientific data and independence are at risk: We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political interference. By @neuralreckoning.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...
- 🔧 Logis - turn your git history into a searchable scientific log. The `@commit` decorator auto-commits your code when your experiment runs - with metadata in the message. Then you can find previous results by querying for commits with (e.g.) metrics.accuracy > 0.9. github.com/flywhl/logis
- 🔧 Logis - turn your git history into a searchable scientific log. The `@commit` decorator auto-commits your code when your experiment runs - with metadata in the message. Then you can find previous results by querying for commits with (e.g.) metrics.accuracy > 0.9. github.com/flywhl/logis
- The SDK is similar to Weights & Biases, just add relevant data to your experiment's run.
- Or use the (work-in-progress) implicit API, where logis finds your parameters/metrics in the arguments and return value.
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View full threadThis is part of @flywhl.dev, an initiative building devtools for science. Join our Discord: discord.gg/kTkF2e69fH We've also made a "Call for Problems" in the workflow of computational science, which helps us decide what to build next: flywhl-ideas.notion.site
- Reposted by Rory ByrneTwo Hard Things (2009) Discussion
- Reposted by Rory ByrneWho likes categories anyway? I wonder what this means for the concept of "areas"... #neuroscience www.thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...
- 🔧 Cyantic v0.3.0 - a little library I wrote that builds complex Python objects (like Tensors) from simple blueprints using @pydantic.dev. (The name comes from cyanotype photography, i.e. the "blueprint") #opensource #python #openscience github.com/flywhl/cyantic
- The idea is simple: write an object's Blueprint once, then whenever you need that object in your @pydantic.dev models, just pass in the parameters. In #machinelearning and #neuroai, we build a lot of Tensors from various parameterisations...
- You can also pre-process the raw data using @hooks. The @env:MY_VARIABLE hook loads data from an environment variable. The @value:path.to.val hook references a value in the raw input data. The @import:foo.bar dynamically imports a Python object.
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View full threadThis is part of @flywhl.dev where we're building simple, declarative software tools for science. Come say hi! Discord: discord.gg/fd37MFZ7RS
- 🔧 Re-sharing an old tool: a recursive function to generate hierarchical, modular, Dalean connectivity matrices in PyTorch. Modules are locally dense, with increasingly sparse connections to more distal modules. #neuroai #neuroskyence gist.github.com/rorybyrne/dd...
- Supports Dale's Law: inhibitory neurons (blue columns) have local within-module connections only.
- Inspired by Fig. 5 from this study by @sarahmuldoon.bsky.social and @danisbassett.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/sre...
- I see the talks from Montreal AI and Neuroscience (MAIN) 2024 are now online: www.youtube.com/@MAINConfere... #neuroai #neuroskyence
- Forget LLMs, we need more good-old-fashioned code generation. Especially in science. I should be able to define models, analysis, wet-lab protocols, and figures in a declarative language (SQL is declarative), and use opinionated tools to generate the required code. github.com/sqlc-dev/sqlc
- "Scientific code is too intricate, and requires human attention." A huge amount of variance in scientific code is self-imposed noise. How many bugs boil down to getting the dimensions of a matrix wrong? Code generation means that those decisions are made for you.
- Dimension errors are the "missing semi-colon" of scientific code. They cause an inordinate amount of pain, but can be solved trivially with post-processing of code.
- Pleasantly surprised to see surrogate gradients used here to optimise over collision detection events (@ 18:28). Relevant for #NeuroAI since step functions can model lots of things in neurons beyond just spiking. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Al...
- Nice to see journals thinking about software tools, but I wonder if they can offer more to toolmakers than “here is a place to re-write your README in more opaque language”?
- 🛠️ November's most-read Tools and Resources paper presents a new method to identify dynamic causal interactions in complex systems: buff.ly/3Zldxpt Learn more about publishing your tools or resources with us: buff.ly/4f2O0Ht
- Reposted by Rory ByrneIf you work with Python dataframes (pandas, @pola.rs) and are not using skrub.TableReport, you're missing out 😀 We keep improving it
- A new version of skrub is out! skrub 0.4.1 fixes some issues with the TableReport and the tabular_learner, fills some gaps in the documentation, and ensures compatibility with the latest scikit-learn version (1.6). Changelog: skrub-data.org/stable/CHANG...
- 86% of OSS contributions from organisations are in the form of employee labour.
- Reposted by Rory ByrneUnconscious mind rules the roost. "According to the researchers, this theory is important because it explains that all our decisions and actions are actually made unconsciously, although we fool ourselves into believing that we consciously made them." www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/2022/1...
- And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle.
