Dimitra Maoutsa

I am looking for a theory/computational POSTDOC position in EU or east coast US. I am interested in how learning and plasticity shape population dynamics & representational geometries & how these changes are reflected in behavior. If you are at #COSYNE2026 & interested, hit me up in Whova, not here

It was a great pleasure having Mitchell explain his work on Dynamical Similarity Analysis to our lab. We learned a lot and got some new ideas about how to look at our datasets.

AI is amplifying many defects of dysfunctional social systems including the academic evaluation system. I will try my best to rely even less on impact factors and pay more attention to high quality science when evaluating other academics. (but I'll have to decline more requests for evaluations.)

Faculty. I'm just saying that an effective place to counter publish-or-perish-ism is at the point where it's enforced, like in tenure committee deliberations. But those are confidential, so observers have no way of knowing who's standing up for what.

In my view a lot of the problems with the flood of papers in academia right now are ultimately downstream of publish or perish and publication counting in academia which has long since been causing problems in academia before AI came along.

New Opinion in TiCS on what babies "know"! Some argue for innate concepts of objects, number, and morality. I offer an alternative perspective: attentional biases + perceptual prediction. No less impressive, but importantly different! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

me: now that i completed a draft, writing this will be so much easier the draft:

How do you tell if authors fabricated their research results? Sometimes: they just tell you. Read, e.g., this caption carefully. Another banger of a post by my friend Nihar B. Shah on his blog, where he found at least 20+ such #ICLR2027 submissions: researchonresearch.blog/2026/10/20/s...

Our paper showing privileged representational axes in brains and ANNS, by the amazing @meenakshikhosla.bsky.social, w/ @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social and @itsneuronal.bsky.social, is finally out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Meenakshi's tweet thread here: x.com/meenakshik93... and in this thread....

Not to brag, but our product has been foldable since 1828.

it's like my unconscious is dreaming up postdocs now

This recent paper describes a mechanism that could explain how sensory memories are #held and #reset in the brain It is a beautiful story involving the #thalamus, PPC, and an unusual protagonist: the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

🚨 New preprint! 🧵 Brain regions 🧠 integrate information over different timescales ⏱️: short in sensorimotor cortex, long in association cortex. But do regions change their timescales when we engage in a task? And how does that flexibility develop? 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Do brain connections just carry information between regions, or do they transform it? Lab's latest is out in Nature Neuroscience, led by Lakshman Chakravarthula: "Network geometry shapes the transformation of task representations across the human cortex" www.colelab.org/pubs/Chakrav... 1/n

The brain uses dimensionality reduction as a built-in feature of its wiring. Network geometry shapes the transformation of task representations across the human cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Interested in a Ph.D. in comp neuro? Consider applying to CU Anschutz. Our community is growing with groups led by Nick Lesica, @teissa.bsky.social , Christopher Cueva, and myself! Topics: neural dynamics, circuit & behavioral modeling, neuroAI, closed-loop neurostim. Links below #CompNeuro #NeuroAI

A colleague recently said that a good effect of AI will be the downfall of classical academic publishing, and I wholeheartedly agree. No tear lost for publishers who have for decades enriched itself from content they neither produced nor edited.

Almost four years ago, An and I were just starting to prepare this manuscript when tragedy struck. Since then, Qiyu and the team have worked extremely hard to bring this study to light. I could not be more proud of them.

🧠 In RNNs trained on a memory task, HNC drives the networks to learn drastically different representations and dynamics. The canonical trained network stores memory as fixed points. During HNC, these fixed points split, multiply, or disappear, while the networks maintain 100% task accuracy (5/12)

Super excited about this new work from @annhuang42.bsky.social! We developed a method for identifying different solutions to a task in neural networks of all types by walking along the flat directions of the loss landscape. Doing so revealed a ton of hidden solutions nearby in weight space!

Can we find shared neural spaces across subjects? Yes! We introduce Multi-encoder-decoder-VAE (MED-VAE), a method for model-guided cross-subject shared spaces. Fantastic work led by @pangeliki.bsky.social #CCN2026 (selected for a talk) 🧵 1/6

How much representational diversity exists around a trained network? A lot, it turns out! Moving a ViT’s weights by 1.3% while preserving its predictions, its representations end up less similar to the original than a random-init ViT’s ‼️ New paper: Hessian Null Space Continuation (HNC) 💫🧵 (1/12)

Biological brains "accept higher metabolic cost to gain both robustness and capability" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Brains are expensive but they're good at what they do.

1. It’s not what you had planned for the project? 2. It’s not the field you were trained in? 3. It’s not certain to work? In science, as in art, the trick is to be open to going wherever the project directs you.

What a cover.

So another all-male sweep in Nobels in STEM and economics. The choices were all good ones, but it's still a problem.

This is an astonishing @pubpeer.com post: pubpeer.com/publications... The author compares data points from a figure against random numbers produced with a certain seed, finding r > 0.999999996! 🫠 Could there be any possible innocent explanation? The paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The funniest one of these I’ve seen

BRAIN PEOPLE! 🧠 Activating my network! My unbelievably excellent postdoc, @aliekhlasi.bsky.social will finish with me next August (grant runs out). He's a brilliant expert in all things neuroimaging & computational analysis, ...

Congrats to Deisseroth, Hegemann and Nagel! I remember Karl’s lecture in Edinburgh in 2010 completely blowing my undergrad mind. I absolutely had to do a PhD involving opsins... A year later I found myself recording light-evoked responses in VTA in the Morris lab, mind blown for the 2nd time 🤯

To understand the brain, we need to study groups of neurons, not individual cells alone. These groups form distinct “subspaces,” allowing different downstream areas to extract the information they need. Beyond single-cell sensory representations in cortex doi.org/10.1016/j.co... #neuroscience

New preprint from our lab ⚡ Why do DA and BF bursting neurons carry such similar reward-prediction signals? Are they independent, driven by common input, or causally linked? We find a direct answer: DA activity rapidly and causally drives BF. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/10

Interested in a PhD in Computational Neuroscience? The University of Colorado Anschutz has THREE great pathways! We have a thriving comp neuro community here with faculty including @laurelinelogiaco.bsky.social, Chris Cueva, and myself! #ComputationalNeuroscience #PhDLife #CUAnschutz

What kind of dynamics underlie sequence working memory? In the last project of my PhD we developed and analysed RNNs fitted to multi-session single-unit data of macaques. Now out on: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @jakhmack.bsky.social and data from Chen et al., Neuron 2024. [1/4]

In light of the Cornell case: an invitation to Actively stop group abuse of women at all levels. Report text chains, stop them. But also Data shows mundane group abuse of women in slander/gossip, dismissal of expertise, policing, low credit/hiring/promotion/pay, humiliation, disrespect, etc. Say No⛔

Intrinsic rewards guide visual resource allocation via reinforcement learning

If you are at #BernsteinConference @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social today, come by 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐈𝐈𝐈 𝟖𝟗 to listen from @johnmadridcarvajal.bsky.social 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐝𝐲𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐬 in 🐁 visual crtx. Work with 𝗞𝗮𝘁𝗷𝗮 𝗞𝗮𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗼𝘀𝗸𝗶, 𝗜𝘀𝗵𝘁 𝗦𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗵, 𝗥𝗼𝗵𝗶𝘁 𝗝𝗲𝘀𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗵🧠 🔗 abstracts.g-node.org/conference/B...

What are the dynamics underlying sequence working memory? To found out, we develop and analyse RNNs fitted to multi-session single-unit data of macaques. See my talk Wed 12:00, at @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social. With @jakhmack.bsky.social @mackelab.bsky.social Data from Chen et al., Neuron 2024.

Whatever you do, don't smoke an entire brisket at a job interview, it's a lot of equipment to bring in, it takes a really long time to do it right and those conference rooms have notoriously poor ventilation

Heterogeneous single-cell dynamics support stable population codes for objects in the mouse anterior cingulate cortex

50 commentaries from various groups around the world, excited to dig in www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

How many bits of information can different synaptic learning rules store about spike trains? In new work I attempt to calculate this analytically and propose a potential first-principles account of BTSP: journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

Neuromatch Impact Scholars are smart, dedicated, motivated, and have also gone thru at least one of our courses! Mentoring them can lead to publications and other important outputs! Apply to mentor today -- fantastic opportunity!

new week new boost for myself lol

Come and catch @dimma.bsky.social and me at the #BernsteinConference @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social Poster Session III to explore our pod’s Impact Scholar’s work. A big thank you to @dimma.bsky.social for supervision and guidance and to @neuromatch.bsky.social for their incredible support! 🙌🏽🧠🐭

💫 Catch @johnmadridcarvajal.bsky.social with his pod's Impact Scholar's work 'Reward Aligns Dominant Population Modes with Task-Relevant Information' at the #BernsteinConference @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social Poster Session III on Wednesday! Learn more: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...