Nick Blauch
Perception + Robotics @ NVIDIA | prev. Postdoc @ Harvard Vision Sciences Lab, Ph.D in Neural Computation @ CMU
https://nblauch.github.io
- Personal update: I’m elated to have joined NVIDIA as a researcher in Seattle where I will be working on human-inspired sim2real perception in robotics. Grateful for the amazing opportunity and excited to see where this journey goes!
- To be clear, there is nothing inconsistent with 1) large scale “areas” being extremely functionally relevant and 2) them being just one scale of a locally and globally coherent map of activity!
- Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Very excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! See below for my two presentations -- a talk today and a poster Friday. Come say hi!
- Reposted by Nick BlauchWhat makes visual processing in the brain so powerful and flexible? Very excited to share our new work where we started from SOTA models that accurately predict dynamic brain activity during hours of video watching, and investigated core computations underlying visual perception
- 🧠 NEW PREPRINT Many-Two-One: Diverse Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Nick BlauchExcited to share a new preprint w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social! Why are there gradients of plasticity and sparsity along the neocortex–hippocampus hierarchy? We show that brain-like organization of these properties emerges in ANNs that meta-learn layer-wise plasticity and sparsity. bit.ly/4kB1yg5
- Reposted by Nick BlauchExciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168
- Very cool work and very in line with how we've been thinking about category selectivity in topographic neural net models -- one scale of an inherently interactive topographic network. Their results provide important constraints for the next generation of active, multimodal neural net models.
- How is high-level visual cortex organized? In a new preprint with @martinhebart.bsky.social & @kathadobs.bsky.social, we show that category-selective areas encode a rich, multidimensional feature space 🌈 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence 🧵 1/n
- Reposted by Nick BlauchCan seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case. Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchBREAKING: A federal judge reversed National Institutes of Health's terminations of hundreds of critical research grants that were canceled because of their alleged connection to disfavored topics, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender identity. This is a major win for public health.
- What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n
- Recent spatially-constrained deep neural networks have shown how task-optimized learning under local constraints in high-level vision gives rise to smooth organization of representations and functionally relevant clusters of category-selectivity. Ours: 2/n
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchAmerica cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.
- Reposted by Nick BlauchWhat are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick Blauch🧪 Basic science boosts the economy: "The proposed dismantling of NSF [and NIH] raises an urgent question: do these cuts actually save money or merely delay spending until the bill gets larger? The answer is clear: these cuts will cost the economy billions."
- Reposted by Nick BlauchI’m happy to be at #VSS2025 and share what our lab has been up to this year! I’m also honored to receive this year’s young investigator award and will give a short talk at the awards ceremony Monday
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Just back from an awesome visit to Georgia Tech to speak at their Computational Cognition Postdoc Day. Very impressed by their community. And really happy to finally have met my good friend and student @neurotaha.bsky.social in person after knowing each other remotely for over 3 years!
- Reposted by Nick BlauchTime to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10
- Reposted by Nick Blauch
[This post could not be retrieved] - Reposted by Nick Blauchin press @natcomms.nature.com 🌟 "Multimodal gradients unify local and global cortical organization" 7T MRI + cytoarchitectonics reveal a sensory-paralimbic axis of areal specialization & integration led by superstar Yezhou Wang & a terrific team of friends & colleagues ▶️ doi.org/10.1038/s414...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchI got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.
- Friday Night Massacre of accurate information. A devastating day for the USA as tens of millions of dollars of grants seeking to combat the spread of false information were terminated. We have a federal govenrment that does not consider the verifiable truth a priority. www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchThere is a PR narrative quickly emerging about “entitlement” of elite universities, as if this $ is some sort of subsidy Harvard & others must counter this quickly The $ doesn’t flow into Harvard’s coffers - this is grant money, most of which goes to research the govt has agreed has social value
- Reposted by Nick BlauchTop-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈 Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
- Extremely proud of Harvard for making this choice. I was feeling a lot of despair at the idea that they would cave like Columbia, and that others would follow suit. Let the battle for intellectual freedom begin. www.harvard.edu/president/ne...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchSee how this works? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchHow does the brain work? Scientists are closer to the answer with the largest wiring diagram and functional map of a mammalian brain to date. 🧵 🧠📈
- Reposted by Nick BlauchThe crush of new grant cancellations hasn't let up. If your grant was terminated (or your app was pulled) please use this Google Form👇 to submit details for tracking purposes. Multiple advocacy efforts are moving forward, but we must must must know more about what grants were cancelled and why.
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick Blauch
- Read this www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch📣 Excited to announce our workshop "Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Complex Planning, Embodiment, and Beyond" at the upcoming @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #CoSyNe2025! 🧠🤖 🪱🪰🐟🐝🐭💪 Schedule: neuro-agent-models.github.io 🗓️ Join us in Mont-Tremblant, Canada, on March 31!
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchLast year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.
- Reposted by Nick BlauchIn the physical world, almost all information is transmitted through traveling waves -- why should it be any different in your neural network? Super excited to share recent work with the brilliant @mozesjacobs.bsky.social: "Traveling Waves Integrate Spatial Information Through Time" 1/14
- Reposted by Nick BlauchI just wrote a book about how the type of work @markhisted.org is doing is key to breaking through the bottlenecks holding back new treatments for brain and mental disorders (from Alzheimers to depression). Seeing his work in danger makes me ill, and angry. We must @standupforscience.bsky.social.
- Compelling pushback from @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social and the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH) regarding termination of tenure-track investigators driven by DOGE. 1/2
- Reposted by Nick BlauchEnjoyed sharing our work on electric fish with @dryohanjohn.bsky.social⚡🐟 Their electric "conversations" help us build models to discover neural mechanisms of social cognition. Work led by Sonja Johnson-Yu & @satpreetsingh.bsky.social with Nate Sawtell kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/news/what-el...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Nick BlauchAcademic workers across the country are organizing to call on our congressional representatives on Thursday, 1/30, at 3pm ET / 12pm PT to demand these restrictions be lifted immediately. There will be a training over zoom at the beginning of the event. Join us! form.jotform.com/250226137228...
- Reposted by Nick Blauch[Not loaded yet]
