Overview

Mission Statement

This journal club aims to provide a forum for discussing neurons, brains, and behavior among people with diverse quantitative and neurobiology backgrounds. Weekly meetings will focus on a paper relevant to a theoretical understanding of some neuroscientific problem or system. Graduate students and postdocs are especially encouraged to attend and propose/present papers. Appropriate papers present neural data, theoretical models, foundational principles for computation, new statistical, mathematical, or machine learning methods, etc.

Time & Place

Wednesdays, 6:00pm - 7:30pm EST
MIT: 46-3015 (google maps)
Harvard: Northwest Building, Room 353 (google maps)
The journal club alternates between Harvard and MIT. Check the Meetings table below for the location of the next meeting.

Mailing List

Subscribe to the journal club mailing list.
Organizers: Please contact Sugandha Sharma (susharma@mit.edu), or Fernanda De La Torre (dlatorre@mit.edu) if you are interested in presenting at one of our meetings or have any questions about the journal club.

Meetings

Below is the list of upcoming, as well as all prior journal club meetings.

Date Presenter Reading Location
Fall 2021

Hybrid in-person/zoom

Meeting schedule at the given link (link)

MIT (46-5165 MIBR Reading Room)

Spring 2021

VCN (collaboration with Stanford)

Meeting schedule at the given link (link)

Zoom meeting

Fall 2020

VCN (collaboration with Stanford and Princeton)

Meeting schedule at the given link (link)

Zoom meeting

06.05.2020

Miachael Happ

Spanning the arc between optimality theories and data, Gasper Tkacik (link)

Zoom meeting

05.29.2020

Julia Steinberg

Fundamental Law of Memory Recall (Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 018101 (2020)), Michelangelo Naim et. al. (link)

Zoom meeting

05.22.2020

Sugandha Sharma

The hippocampus as a predictive map, Sam Gershman (link)

Zoom meeting

05.15.2020

Miachael Happ

Deep reinforcement learning and its neuroscientific implications, Matt Botvinick (link)

Zoom meeting

05.08.2020

Sugandha Sharma

Neural mechanisms of spatial cognition, Neil Burgess (link)

Zoom meeting

05.01.2020

Miachael Happ

Neural codes for natural behaviors in flying bats, Nachum Ulanovsky (link)

Zoom meeting

04.24.2020

Sugandha Sharma

Multiple maps for navigation, Lisa Giocomo (link)

Zoom meeting

02.21.2020

Haozhe Shan

Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks, Arthur Jacot, Franck Gabriel and Clement Hongler (link)

Harvard (Northwest building, Room 353)

02.07.2020

Nayantara Mudur

A model of temporal scaling correctly predicts that motor timing improves with speed, Nicholas F. Hardy, Vishwa Goudar, Juan L. Romero-Sosa & Dean V. Buonomano (link)

Harvard (Northwest building, Room 243)

12.13.2019

Eghbal Hosseini

Reverse engineering recurrent neural networks for sentiment classification reveals line attractor dynamics, Surya Ganguli, David Sussilo et al. (link)

Harvard (Northwest building, Room 243)

12.06.2019

Michael Happ

A Unifying Mechanistic Model of the AuditoryCortex with Inhibitory Subtypes, Youngmin Park and Maria N. Geffen (link)

MIT (46-6199)

11.22.2019

Rylan Schaeffer

Fundamental bounds on learning performance in neural circuits, Raman, Rotondo and O'Leary (link)

Harvard (Northwest building, Room 255)

11.15.2019

Nhat Le

Prioritized memory access explains planning and hippocampal replay, Marcelo G Mattar and Nathaniel D. Daw (link)

MIT (46-6199)

11.8.2019

Greta Tuckute and Alvince Pongos

Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity, Moses et al. (link)

MIT (46-6199)

11.1.2019

Mikail Khona

Stable memory with unstable synapses, Lee Susman, Naama Brener, and Omri Barak (link)

Harvard (Northwest building, Room 255)

10.11.2019

Jungsoo Kim

Convergent Temperature Representations in Artificial and Biological Neural Networks, Martin Haesemeyer, Alexander F. Schier and Florian Engert (link)

MIT (46-5193)

9.27.2019

Sam Lewallen

Mathematical theorey of semantic development in deep neural networks, Andrew M. Saxe, James L. McClelland and Surya Ganguli (link)

MIT (46-6199)

9.20.2019

Nimrod Shaham

Sparse Associative Memory, Heiko Hoffman (link)

Harvard (Northwest building, Room 255)

8.21.2019

Martin Schrimpf

Deep Networks and Pytorch (link)

MIT 46-1015

8.7.2019

Eli Pollock

Training recurrent neural networks (RNNs) using FORCE (link)

MIT 46-3189

7.17.2019

Alex Lew

Probabilistic programming languages (link)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

6.26.2019

Ben Huh, Jennifer Hu and Peng Qian

Tutorial: Backpropagation through time in RNNs and LSTMs (link)

MIT 46-1015

6.12.2019

Sugandha Sharma and Nhat Le

Tutorial: Building large scale neural models using the Nengo neural simulator, (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

5.30.2019

Marc Howard
Link to video recording

Compressed representation of time and space in the brain using the Laplace transform
*special research presentation*

MIT 46-3310 (**note different location for this meeting**)

5.23.2019

Michael Happ

Task representations in neural networks trained to perform many cognitive tasks, Yang, Joglekar, Song, Newsome, Wang (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

4.25.2019

Haozhe Shan

Deep Learning with Dynamic Spiking Neurons and Fixed Feedback Weights, Samadi, Lillicrap, Tweed (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

4.18.2019

Jungsoo Kim

Global Brain Dynamics Embed the Motor Command Sequence of Caenorhabditis elegans, Kato, Kaplan, Schrö, Skora, Lindsay, Yemini, Lockery, Zimmer (link, pdf)

MIT (46-3015)

4.11.2019

Lucy Lai

Reinforcement regulates timing variability in thalamus, Wang​​, Hosseini​, Meirhaeghe​, Akkad​, Jazayeri​​ (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

4.4.2019

Eli Pollock

Prefrontal cortex as a meta-reinforcement learning system, Wang, Kurth-Nelson, Kumaran, Tirumala, Soyer, Leibo, Hassabis, Botvinick (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

3.28.2019

Noga Weiss Mosheiff

Efficiency and stability of the modular grid cell code
*special research presentation*
(link)

MIT (46-3015)

3.21.2019

Michael Happ, Sugandha Sharma, Sam Lewallen

The emergence of multiple retinal cell types through efficient coding of natural movies, Ocko*, Lindsey*, Ganguli, Deny (link, pdf)

MIT (46-3015)

π.2019

Ila Fiete

A Flexible Model of Working Memory, Bouchacourt, Buschman (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

2.21.2019

Ni Ji

Discrete attractor dynamics underlies persistent activity in the frontal cortex, Inagaki, Fontonal, Romani, Svoboda (link, pdf)

MIT (46-3015)

2.14.2019

Honi Sanders

Off-line replay maintains declarative memories in a model of hippocampal-neocortical interactions, Kali, Dayan (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

2.7.2019

Nimrod Shaham

Long-Term Memory Stabilized by Noise-Induced Rehearsal, Alexei, Koulakov (link, pdf)

MIT (46-3015)

12.13.2018

Leo Kozachkov

Neuronal Circuits Underlying Persistent Representations Despite Time Varying Activity, Druckmann, Chklovskii (link, pdf)

MIT (46-3015)

12.6.2018

Michael Happ

Learning arbitrary dynamics in efficient, balanced spiking networks using local plasticity rules, Alemi, Machens, Denève, Slotine (link, pdf)

Harvard (Northwest Building, Room 353)

11.27.2018

Sam Lewallen

Opening the black box: low-dimensional dynamics in high-dimensional recurrent neural networks, Sussillo, Barak (link, pdf)

MIT (46-5056, special location for first meeting)