Congratulations, Axel (woot woot), for being awarded an SNSF Swiss Postdoctoral Fellowship, the interim Swiss equivalent of a Marie Curie European Fellowship, to work on fundamental questions pertaining to neuronal circuit architectures and learning. WeContinue reading
Fluctuation-driven initialization for spiking neural network training
Surrogate gradients are a great tool for training spiking neural networks in computational neuroscience and neuromorphic engineering, but what is a good initialization? In our new preprint co-led by Julian and Julia, we lay outContinue reading
Spektrum der Wissenschaft story on self-calibration in neuromorphic systems
We are very happy that in their current issue Spektrum der Wissenschaft picked up our collaboration story with Uni Heidelberg on self-calibration through surrogate gradient learning in analog neuromorphic systems.
High school students visiting the FMI
Lab members organized a station for a recent outreach event during which more than 200 high school students from Basel and surroundings visited the FMI to learn more about genetics and neuroscience research. At theContinue reading
Hebbian plasticity could be the brain’s trick to make self-supervised learning work
Please take a look at our new preprint “The combination of Hebbian and predictive plasticity learns invariant object representations in deep sensory networks.” https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2022.03.17.484712v2 In this work led by Manu Srinath Halvagal we argue thatContinue reading
Swiss Computational Neuroscience Retreat 2022
This year a group of computational neuroscientists consisting of group leaders and trainees from Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, and Zurich convened in Crans-Montana for an intensive three-day in-person event with talks and discussions on recentContinue reading
Back to in-person Comp Neuro Seminars in Basel
After almost two-years of pause, the Computational Neuroscience Initiative Basel organized their first in-person seminar with Prof. Adrienne Fairhall (University of Washington). The hybrid event was attended by a broad audience from the Biozentrum, IOB,Continue reading
Quantamagazine covers our work on learning on analog neuromorphic hardware
Allison Whitten wrote a nice article for Quantamagazine about our recent collaboration with Heidelberg on the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic chip. Analog hardware faces similar obstacles as the brain when learning: Neuronal heterogeneity means that you won’tContinue reading
Join the team – we are hiring
We are looking for undergrads, PhD students, and post-docs who possess dependable quantitative skills and are curious about how neural networks in the brain learn and process information. Research directions of interest include: We offerContinue reading
Story on Spiking Neural Networks
Here is a quick shout-out to this nice news story on spiking nets and surrogate gradients by Anil Ananthaswamy, the Science Communicator in Residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley.Continue reading