News

We always get asked how we a) track our videos and b) record our fish. In a future post I’ll outline our main tracking pipelines, but I’m excited to share that our recording pipeline is fully documented and available on github! This includes all of the raspberry pi code that keeps things running smoothly, as well as the code for a supervisor computer that checks for errors and processes videos each night. Some of this will certainly need to be adapted for your specific system (based on your storage situation), but this is a fairly robust toolbox for recording, and it comes with complementary fish jokes.

About 2 years ago, I pitched a Computer Vision workshop for biologists as part of a fellowship. I ended up getting an NSF fellowship instead, but that workshop has been bouncing around in my head for the last couple years. Finally I decided to organize it properly, started making plans, emailing participants, organized funding, and to my surprise, it actually happened, this past weekend!

About 2 years ago, I was home sick with Covid wondering how to spend my time while I waited to get back into the lab. We had some experiments slated, which we had proposed for my NSF fellowship in which we had proposed the idea that Bayesian updating was responsible for the winner/effects. We had pitched it as a simple conceptual model, but since I had a few days at home, I thought I could code it up as a proper agent-based simulation, to see if our intuitions were correct. 10 days later, I had a solid simulation with some cool preliminary results. Let’s write it up as a paper, we said. It will be fun, we said.

New paper just dropped! This was the first project I worked on at Penn as a grad student and my deepest dive into neuroscience thus far. After pivoting towards computer vision and behavior, Jessie Burke (now at Columbia), took over the final, very technical experiments and wrote the paper to get it to publication. It’s a cool project, and I am really happy to have been a part of it (though in total honesty, I was happy to move on to less crunchy neuro projects).