Joao Barbosa
INSERM group leader @ Neuromodulation Institute and NeuroSpin (Paris) in computational neuroscience.
How and why are computations enabling cognition distributed across the brain?
Expect neuroscience and ML content.
jbarbosa.org
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- Reposted by Joao BarbosaNew @pnas.org paper out 🎉 “Representational drift reflects ongoing balancing of stochastic changes by Hebbian learning” 👉 doi.org/10.1073/pnas... What drives representational drift in neural populations? Here’s the short version. 👇 🧪🧠 1/5
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaDeadline in 3 days (Thursday 5th) to apply for a PhD with me and @ktsetsos.bsky.social at Trinity College Dublin in Cognitive Computational Neuroscience / neuro-AI. Please share!
- 🎓Fully-funded PhD studentship in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience!!! Join @seanfw.bsky.social and myself at @tcddublin.bsky.social for a PhD at the intersection of cutting-edge cognitive neuroscience (OPM-MEG) and neuro-AI. 🗓 Deadline: 5 Feb 2026 #neurojobs #neuroscience #compneuro
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaA new review of Elusive Cures is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. Appreciated! I'd love to see it inspire other researchers to spell out their ideas about the "Grand Plan". Progress in our next steps depends on such discussions. www.cell.com/current-biol...
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaJoin us 7-15 Feb for #Python for Computational Science Week! 🐍 Students preparing to apply to our July courses 🐍 Those wanting to brush up Python skills 🐍 Aspiring TAs Free and open to all! ➡️ Take the pledge: airtable.com/appIQSZMZ0Jx... #ComputationalScience #SelfStudy #PythonWeek
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- Reposted by Joao Barbosa@seanmcarroll.bsky.social, @lisafeldmanbarrett.com, @michaelemann.bsky.social, @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social, @carlbergstrom.com, @erictopol.bsky.social, @sheril.bsky.social, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, @anilseth.bsky.social, @astrokatie.com - all examples of public intellectuals with integrity afaik.
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- Reposted by Joao BarbosaJunior scientists 👉 applications are open for our workshop on the mechanistic basis of #cognition. 🧠 🤝 Joint sessions with our #TheoreticalNeuroscience workshop ✈️ Hotel, meals + reasonable travel expenses covered Apply by May 7 ➡️ janelia.news/CNW26 @michaelreiser.bsky.social @jvoigts.bsky.social
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- Thank you Nicole! Nicole's wonderful book 'Elusive Cures' has played an important role in pushing me out of my comfort zone and join forces w/ @philippedomenech.bsky.social and @bellecguill.bsky.social, here. Exciting times ahead for neuroscience. Go read it, if you haven't yet!
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaNew paper out at PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Revisiting the high-dimensional geometry of population responses in the visual cortex with @jpillowtime.bsky.social. The review took forever because a reviewer was doubtful our new estimator can infer eigenvalues beyond the rank of the data! (1/6)
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- Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻 Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems. See below for + details and retweet 🙏
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaVery exciting to share that @climatecentral.org is hiring a Climate Data Scientist to join a new climate services effort focused on advancing predictions of risks and hazards on seasonal-to-decadal timescales. The application closes on February 9, 2026 at 5pm ET, & the description can be found here:
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaWe are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA. We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material. In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights. link.europa.eu/Fh8h84
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- Lets publish more untested predictions! they show real foresight, not posthoc model tweaking to fit observed data
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaWe go around the room with 5 questions. 1) What did you like about the paper? 2) What did you learn? 3) What would you like to understand better? 4) What would you like to see to improve the paper? 5) What ideas did this spark for your research?
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaNeurIPS reviewers typically review 6+ papers, each with 100 or so citations. The reviewers can't possibly check that every citation is real. But why don't we have an automated way to do this checking (and desk-rejecting if fake citations found) *before* the papers are sent to reviewers?
- NEW: NeurIPS,one of the world’s top academic AI conferences, accepted research papers with 100+ AI-hallucinated citations, new report claims fortune.com/2026/01/21/n...
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaI am very excited to share my first preprint🎉 The pandemic kicked off strongly during the first year of my PhD, and I had to stop the behavioral experiments when mice were starting to understand the task. At the BCB Lab, this showed us that training automation could be a real game changer (🧵1/10)
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- Reposted by Joao BarbosaWe are very excited to announce that our new preprint with Saleh Esteki, @stefanofusi.bsky.social, and @roozbehkiani.bsky.social is now available on biorxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... We investigated how reward context is learned, represented, and updated to bias decisions. Thread 🧵👇! 1/13
- Reposted by Joao Barbosa📚 The international DIM C-BRAINS PhD program is back! Up for grabs: 7 fully funded, 3-year doctoral contracts in the Île-de-France region, 3 of which will be hosted by Paris Brain Institute. 📆 Application deadline: February 1, 2026. 👉 Find out more: parisbraininstitute.org/dim-c-brains...
- Can't recommend this enough!
- @kordinglab.bsky.social and I ran a summer school last year to help young profs (<5 yrs) in systems/comp neuro thrive. compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i... It was great! Now we want to know if you'd be interested in participating if we did this again this year? Let us know!
- Don't miss the opportunity to meet Konrad and Gunnar, the coolest neuroscientists, many of your peers around the world and eventually a nightly bear
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaI am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaIf you'd like to study Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, don't miss this info event on Wednesday! 👉 bit.ly/4aX4Yc8 #CompNeuro #BernsteinNetwork
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaWe extracted (parts of) 12 books in experiments with 4 frontier-lab, production LLMs. We prompted the LLMs with a short prefix of a book and asked them to complete the rest. For Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we extracted 95.8% of the book from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaExcited to be giving the van Vreeswijk Theoretical Neuroscience Seminar this Wednesday, Jan 14, where I'll talk about "Computation Through Neuronal-Synaptic Dynamics"! www.wwtns.online
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaProud of being part of this great paper 🧪
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaBy the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)
- Reposted by Joao Barbosa📣 Pre-COSYNE Brainhack 2026 – Join Us in Lisbon! 🧠✨ March 10–11, 2026 • Lisbon, Portugal pre-cosyne-brainhack.github.io/hackathon2026 Kick off COSYNE week with two days of hands-on, team-based hacking around real electrophysiology data! ✅ Apply now via the event website (limited spots).
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaWith some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaMy new gig is PI of the CANN group at Trinity College Dublin and University of Oxford (50/50). Funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, we'll be recruiting postdocs, PhDs and an RA in Dublin and Oxford soon. So exciting! @oxcin.bsky.social @tcddublin.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk @tcdscss.bsky.social
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaWanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️ The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA): 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828 💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast... I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaI don't know enough to have my own view on this paper or response, but to me this is science social media at its best: doing post publication peer review of papers that make big claims. Bravo @alexanderhuth.bsky.social
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaThis paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!
- Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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- Reposted by Joao BarbosaEpisode #36 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On low-dimensional manifolds in motor cortex – with Sara Solla @sasolla.bsky.social theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn36 Manifold analysis has changed our thinking on how cortex works. One of the pioneers of this modelling approach explains.
- Reposted by Joao Barbosa1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.
- Reposted by Joao BarbosaAt the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
- Reposted by Joao Barbosa"Simple heuristics to run a research group" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
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- Reposted by Joao BarbosaNew Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A
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- Reposted by Joao BarbosaAmid 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-...
