Alexander Ecker
banner
aecker.bsky.social
Alexander Ecker
@aecker.bsky.social
Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Computer Vision • Scientist at @unigoettingen.bsky.social & MPI-DS • https://eckerlab.org • Co-founder of https://maddox.ai • Dad of three • All things outdoor
Touch base with me if you have any questions. I’m happy to chat!
August 15, 2025 at 10:46 AM
🎯 Göttingen is a small university town (around 120k people) and very family friendly. Everything within the city can be reached by bike within 15 min.
August 15, 2025 at 10:46 AM
🌍 Göttingen is located in the center of Germany and Europe, in a region known for its green hills, lovely small towns with half-timbered houses and the Harz Mountains. Well-connected through motorways and high-speed trains.
August 15, 2025 at 10:46 AM
🎓The @goettingen-campus.de is highly collaborative, has a great variety of data-intensive research in natural and life sciences, social science and humanities, including top-notch places like @mpi-nat.bsky.social, @mpsgoettingen.bsky.social, MPI-DS, @primatenzentrum.bsky.social, @dlr-en.bsky.social
August 15, 2025 at 10:46 AM
The position is embedded in the recently founded Lower Saxony Center for AI and Causal Methods in Medicine (CAIMed) caimed.de/en/ as well as the Campus Institute Data Science (CIDAS), Göttingen.
Home - CAIMed - Niedersächsisches Zentrum für KI und Kausale Methoden in der Medizin
CAIMed is the Lower Saxony research center for artificial intelligence and causal methods in medicine. We develop innovative methods for improved, personalized healthcare and contribute to the managem...
caimed.de
August 15, 2025 at 10:46 AM
💡It's a deliberately broad call. Areas of interest include: RL; VR, AR & digital avatars; Embodied AI, NLP; HCI; Causal models; Time series models; Multimodal data integration; Image analysis and CV; Computational and simulation science; Visualization; HPC and Energy-efficient AI.
August 15, 2025 at 10:46 AM
In Lurz et al., ICLR 2021 we did quite some analysis on scaling and generalization across animals in the context of visual response prediction (incl. behavioral modulation) with @sinzlab.bsky.social and @andreastolias.bsky.social: openreview.net/forum?id=Tp7...
Generalization in data-driven models of primary visual cortex
Deep neural networks (DNN) have set new standards at predicting responses of neural populations to visual input. Most such DNNs consist of a convolutional network (core) shared across all neurons...
openreview.net
April 18, 2025 at 1:40 PM
...and of course – shame on me for the oversight – the great @philipp.hertie.ai
April 11, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Thanks to co-authors Marissa Weis, Stelios Papadopoulos, @lhansel.bsky.social, Timo Lüddecke, Brendan Celii, Paul Fahey, Nuno da Costa, Forrest Collman, @csdashm.com , @clayreid.bsky.social, @sebastianseung.bsky.social, @viajake.bsky.social & Andreas Tolias. Funding: @erc.europa.eu & IARPA (12/12)
ky.social
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
It's been great fun to be part of the MICrONS consortium. (11/12)

bsky.app/profile/alle...
How does the brain work?

Scientists are closer to the answer with the largest wiring diagram and functional map of a mammalian brain to date. 🧵

🧠📈
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Using the power of the MICrONS dataset, we could show that our functional digital twin of the neurons could predict the basal bias of cells in lower layer 4 without this model having access to any morphological information. (10/12)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
We found a novel morphological trait in layer 4: neurons that are primarily located in V1 in a narrow stripe around the L4-L5 boundary. These neurons are atufted and avoid reaching into L5 with their basal dendrites. (9/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
There morphological differences between primary visual cortex (V1) and higher visual areas (HVA): In layer 4, atufted neurons are primarily located in V1, while tufted neurons are more abundant in areas AL and RL. (8/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Neurons in layer 2/3 show strong trends with increasing cortical depth: (1) decreasing width of their dendritic arbor and (2) smaller tufts. (7/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Dendritic morphologies vary with respect to three major axes: (1) the soma depth, (2) the total skeletal length of the apical dendrites and (3) the total skeletal length of the basal dendrites. (6/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Dendritic morphologies form mostly a continuum, with distinct clusters only in deeper layers (e.g. layer 5 ET neurons). A quantitative test using synthethic surrogate data suggested that from layer 2 throughout upper layer 5 no density gaps exist and dendritic morphologies change continuously (5/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Our learned embeddings capture the essence of the 3D morphology of neurons and reflect known excitatory cell types from mouse V1. (4/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
We employed GraphDINO, a self-supervised method for learning representations of neuronal morphologies without relying on manual annotations. The model outputs a vector embedding for each neuron that captures the morphological features of its dendritic tree. (3/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM
The data underlying our analysis is from the MICrONS consortium: a ~1mm³ volume of tissue from the mouse visual cortex, densely reconstructed using serial section electron microscopy, segmented into more than 54,000 individual neurons, among them ~30,000 excitatory ones. (2/12)
April 11, 2025 at 12:20 PM