Friedemann Zenke
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fzenke.bsky.social
Friedemann Zenke
@fzenke.bsky.social
720 followers 310 following 24 posts
Computational neuroscientist at the FMI.
www.zenkelab.org
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fzenke.bsky.social
Friedemann Zenke @fzenke.bsky.social · Nov 27
1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social
fzenke.bsky.social
I’m very grateful to the FMI, the tenure committee, inspiring colleagues, and all the hidden supporters who made this possible. Huge thanks to past and present group members for their curiosity and creativity. Excited for the next chapter.
fmiscience.bsky.social FMI science @fmiscience.bsky.social · 19d
Huge congratulations to @fzenke.bsky.social on his promotion to Senior Group Leader! His team uses AI-powered models of neural networks to uncover how dynamic brain connections enable new memories. Learn more about his research in this video👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDu...
How AI can help reveal the workings of the brain
YouTube video by The Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research
www.youtube.com
December 19, 2025 at 7:44 AM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
billpod.bsky.social
I’m happy to share some recent work out in PLOS Computational Biology with @guille-martin.bsky.social and Christian Machens at @champalimaudr.bsky.social . We use neural coding and population geometry to study different perspectives on hippocampal remapping.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Three types of remapping with linear decoders: A population-geometric perspective
Author summary Place cells of the hippocampus form unique activity patterns in different environments, a process called remapping. However, it is not clear what the relationship is between changes in ...
journals.plos.org
December 9, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
neurograce.bsky.social
Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p...
#MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
Lindsay Lab - Postdoc Position
Artificial neural networks applied to psychology, neuroscience, and climate change
lindsay-lab.github.io
December 8, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
rdgao.bsky.social
Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year:

www.gao-unit.com/join-us/

If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply!

I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮
December 3, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
jakhmack.bsky.social
Come work with us!!!
mackelab.bsky.social Machine Learning in Science @mackelab.bsky.social · Nov 28
We are looking for a Research Engineer (E13 TV-L) to work at the intersection of #ML and #compneuro! 🤖🧠

Help us build large-scale bio-inspired neural networks, write high-quality research code, and contribute to open-source tools like jaxley, sbi, and flyvis 🪰.

More info: www.mackelab.org/jobs/
Jobs - mackelab
The MackeLab is a research group at the Excellence Cluster Machine Learning at Tübingen University!
www.mackelab.org
December 4, 2025 at 7:36 AM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
trackingactions.bsky.social
Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing our mechanistic understanding of the shared structure between the brain and higher-order behaviours. In this Review, Mathis and Mathis synthesize state-of-...
www.nature.com
December 3, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
sushrutthorat.bsky.social
🚨New Preprint!
How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715

+ @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social
🧵 1/14
Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex
Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...
arxiv.org
November 18, 2025 at 12:37 PM
fzenke.bsky.social
1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social
November 27, 2025 at 8:24 AM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
drtnowotny.bsky.social
Excited to see the paper fully published. It's an important milestone for training SNNs with exact gradients, replacing our earlier tricks of a "delay line augmentation" to capture temporal relationships. Delays can now be learnt alongside weights naturally. Amazing work @mbalazs98.bsky.social !
November 25, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
neural-reckoning.org
Psst - neuromorphic folks. Did you know that you can solve the SHD dataset with 90% accuracy using only 22 kb of parameter memory by quantising weights and delays? Check out our preprint with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social and @danakarca.bsky.social, or read the TLDR below. 👇🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2510.27434
Exploiting heterogeneous delays for efficient computation in low-bit neural networks
Neural networks rely on learning synaptic weights. However, this overlooks other neural parameters that can also be learned and may be utilized by the brain. One such parameter is the delay: the brain...
arxiv.org
November 13, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
neural-reckoning.org
Spiking NN fans - the #SNUFA workshop (Nov 5-6) agenda is finalised and online now. Make sure to register (free) soon. (Note you can register for either day and come to both.)

Agenda: snufa.net/2025/
Registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/snufa-2025...

Thanks to all who voted on abstracts!

🤖🧠🧪
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
snufa.net
October 23, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
neural-reckoning.org
Message for participants of the #SNUFA 2025 spiking neural network workshop. We got almost 60 awesome abstract submissions, and we'd now like your help to select which ones should be offered talks. Follow the "abstract voting" link at snufa.net/2025/ to take part. It should take <15m. Thanks! ❤️
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
snufa.net
October 1, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
laurelinelogiaco.bsky.social
Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz:
1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro...
2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri...

You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.
September 27, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
kristorpjensen.bsky.social
I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 24, 2025 at 12:04 PM
fzenke.bsky.social
Truly honored (and a little overwhelmed) to see our work featured in The Transmitter's "This Paper Changed My Life." Huge thanks to @neural-reckoning.org for the kind words - and to our amazing community that keeps pushing spiking neural network research forward 🙏
September 17, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
neural-reckoning.org
Submissions (short!) due for SNUFA spiking neural networks conference in <2 weeks! 🤖🧠🧪

forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XkZLavhaJe

More info at snufa.net/2025/

Note that we normally get around 700 participants and recordings go on YouTube and get 100s-1000s views.

Please repost.
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
snufa.net
September 16, 2025 at 9:33 AM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
alexbendel.bsky.social
I am happy to finally share this preprint of my PhD project in @guillaumediss.bsky.social lab at the FMI in Basel.
We used ddPCA to map the genetic architecture of the entire human bZIP interaction network.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks to all our co-authors for the great collaboration!
The genetic architecture of the human bZIP family
Generative biology holds the promise to transform our ability to design and understand living systems by creating novel proteins, pathways, and organisms with tailored functions that address challenge...
www.biorxiv.org
August 25, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
neural-reckoning.org
Spiking neural networks people, this message is for you!

The annual SNUFA workshop is now open for abstract submission (deadline Sept 26) and (free) registration. This year's speakers include Elisabetta Chicca, Jason Eshraghian, Tomoki Fukai, Chengcheng Huang, and... you?

snufa.net/2025/

🤖🧠🧪
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
snufa.net
August 7, 2025 at 11:56 AM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
neural-reckoning.org
We're hiring,, of interest to people in spiking neural networks and neuromorphic particularly. See below. 👇

Note the deadline for applications is very soon! Apologies for this but various admin necessities made it unavoidable.
danakarca.bsky.social Danyal Akarca @danakarca.bsky.social · Jul 25
Hiring a post-doc at Imperial in EEE. Broad in scope + flexible on topics: neural networks & new AI accelerators from a HW/SW co-design perspective!

w/ @neuralreckoning.bsky.social @achterbrain.bsky.social in Intelligent Systems and Networks group.

Plz share! 🚀: www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...
Description
Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...
www.imperial.ac.uk
July 25, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
elife.bsky.social
Ditching months-long delays for fast, constructive feedback.

This interview with @solygamagda.bsky.social dives into the experience of publishing with eLife and what it could mean for a more open and efficient future in science.
Publishing with eLife: “the future of science lies in greater transparency”
Neuroscientist Magdalena Solyga shares her latest study and her experience publishing with eLife.
buff.ly
July 21, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
georgkeller.bsky.social
There might be a bit of misconception here. What the paper very convincingly shows is that visual cortex does not compute global oddball prediction errors and does not receive any top-down predictions that could be used to compute such prediction errors.
July 14, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
durstewitzlab.bsky.social
Got prov. approval for 2 major grants in Neuro-AI & Dynamical Systems Reconstruction, on learning & inference in non-stationary environments, out-of-domain generalization, and DS foundation models. To all AI/math/DS enthusiasts: Expect job announcements (PhD/PostDoc) soon! Feel free to get in touch.
July 13, 2025 at 6:23 AM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
tpvogels.bsky.social
Here is your last reminder that the application deadline for Imbizo.Africa is nearing quickly, the 1st of July, in fact tomorrow. Still the place where diversity is at its best in the world! Tell all who need to hear. #africa #neuro
#Imbizo - Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo - #Imbizo
Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo summer school in Cape Town, South Africa
Imbizo.Africa
June 30, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
hannahpayne.bsky.social
My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum
June 11, 2025 at 10:24 PM
Reposted by Friedemann Zenke
saxelab.bsky.social
How does in-context learning emerge in attention models during gradient descent training?

Sharing our new Spotlight paper @icmlconf.bsky.social: Training Dynamics of In-Context Learning in Linear Attention
arxiv.org/abs/2501.16265

Led by Yedi Zhang with @aaditya6284.bsky.social and Peter Latham
June 4, 2025 at 11:22 AM