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 |
Compressed representation of time and space in the brain using the Laplace transform
|
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
|
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) |