Richard Gao
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rdgao.bsky.social
Richard Gao
@rdgao.bsky.social
AI x neuroscience.

🌊 www.rdgao.com
Reposted by Richard Gao
Just 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!
November 5, 2025 at 10:24 AM
what will we achieve first:

1. world peace
2. off-ball screens in pickup basketball

?
November 5, 2025 at 8:18 PM
sounds about right
October 15, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Reposted by Richard Gao
New post in @jocnforum.bsky.social by Early Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social: "Principles for proper peer review"

doi.org/10.21428/8e6...
Principles for proper peer review
doi.org
October 6, 2025 at 9:02 PM
Manuel Brenner and I managed to organize this workshop not knowing we were gonna end up being new neighbors this month. The lineup speaks for itself.

There were some last minute cancellations so we jumped in to fill their big shoes and will talk about the future directions of the new labs too!
September 29, 2025 at 9:55 AM
I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real:

I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job!

I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math

and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗
a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window
ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window
media.tenor.com
September 23, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Richard Gao
🚨 2 Postdoc openings in Neuroscience – Liège, Belgium 🚨

We are recruiting for a project on brain development & autism that includes:

⚡ Neuropixels recordings
⚡ Opto/chemo
⚡ Behavior
⚡ Neural network modeling

If you know someone, tag them or RT for visibility! 🙏
www.fens.org/careers/job-...
2 Postdoc Positions in Systems Neuroscience - Federation of European Neuroscience Societies
www.fens.org
September 17, 2025 at 9:38 AM
ES IST WIEDER DENNIS SCHROEDER
a basketball player wearing a jersey that says deutschland on it
ALT: a basketball player wearing a jersey that says deutschland on it
media.tenor.com
September 14, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Reposted by Richard Gao
From hackathon to release: sbi v0.25 is here! 🎉

What happens when dozens of SBI researchers and practitioners collaborate for a week? New inference methods, new documentation, lots of new embedding networks, a bridge to pyro and a bridge between flow matching and score-based methods 🤯

1/7 🧵
September 9, 2025 at 3:00 PM
arguably the most important component of AI for neuroscience:

data, and its usability
🚨 Excited to announce our #NeurIPS2025 Workshop: Data on the Brain & Mind

📣 Call for: Findings (4- or 8-page) + Tutorials tracks

🎙️ Speakers include @dyamins.bsky.social @lauragwilliams.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social

🌐 Learn more: data-brain-mind.github.io
August 11, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Richard Gao
My PhD journey has officially come to end with a Summa Cum Laude, thanks to all the amazing people who’ve supported me along the way, especially my advisors Anna Levina and @engeltatiana.bsky.social!
Which apparently coincided with graduation from a witchcraft and wizardry school 😉

#neuroskyence
July 31, 2025 at 9:17 PM
asked Claude to brainstorm for a new blogpost given two previous ones and it immediately starts talking like me.

let's just say it's very...disconcerting.

also TIL I'm a snarky asshole lol.
June 16, 2025 at 10:28 AM
some advice I got years ago:

if you get lots of questions after your talk, even if they sound mean (they're usually not), it means you did work that people actually bought into and can engage with.
If you're just fishing for validation you might be disappointed to hear a participant yell at you for the entire duration about all the problems. The font is wrong, there aren't enough features, it's too slow.

THIS is real validation. Mfer is bought in to the concept. They're just nitpicking.
June 10, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Richard Gao
Inria is opening a Junior Professor Position (tenure track) at Saclay on the topic of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.

This junior professorship is part of the development of computational cognitive neuroscience within @univparissaclay.bsky.social #Neurospin @neuropsi.bsky.social and #inria
April 28, 2025 at 10:27 AM
Reposted by Richard Gao
Excited to present our work on compositional SBI for time series at #ICLR2025 tomorrow!

If you're interested in simulation-based inference for time series, come chat with Manuel Gloeckler or Shoji Toyota

at Poster #420, Saturday 10:00–12:00 in Hall 3.

📰: arxiv.org/abs/2411.02728
Compositional simulation-based inference for time series
Amortized simulation-based inference (SBI) methods train neural networks on simulated data to perform Bayesian inference. While this strategy avoids the need for tractable likelihoods, it often requir...
arxiv.org
April 25, 2025 at 8:53 AM
Reposted by Richard Gao
I am teaching my phd writing workshop course this quarter, question: are there any words/phrases said to you by an advisor/mentor that stuck with you, were memorable, or particularly helpful? If so please reply below!
April 23, 2025 at 7:45 PM
"but the AI will replace scientists and solve physics"
Someone on Threads noticed you can type any random sentence into Google, then add “meaning” afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase you just made up. Here is mine
April 23, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Reposted by Richard Gao
April 17, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Richard Gao
Thanks so much for the shout-out, and congrats on your exciting work!! 🎉 🙂

Also, a good reminder to share that our work is now out in Cell Reports 🙏🎊

⬇️

www.cell.com/cell-reports...
April 17, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Richard Gao
Ever wonder how LLM developers choose their pretraining data? It’s not guesswork— all AI labs create small-scale models as experiments, but the models and their data are rarely shared.
DataDecide opens up the process: 1,050 models, 30k checkpoints, 25 datasets & 10 benchmarks 🧵
April 15, 2025 at 1:01 PM
build your foundation model on this guy's brain.

no line attractor for fear, only fixed point for idgaf.
Indi-hammy Jones gives zero fucks about the evil dragon at the end of this quest…
April 12, 2025 at 1:33 PM
legitimate reason to start drinking on a Friday afternoon
In the same Friday session (Poster 2-039), @rdgao.bsky.social presents AutoMIND: using machine learning to infer parameters of spiking neural network models from brain recordings.

Come by if you hate fitting spiking networks or love degeneracy and invariances!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
March 28, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Reposted by Richard Gao
Looking forward to presenting our work on Latent Diffusion for Neural Spiking data tonight—Poster 1-108

& experience discussions on scaling in neuroscience firsthand at the foundation model workshop, where I'll talk both about our work on masked VAEs & latent diffusion for neural & behavioral data
We're also at the workshops!

Tuesday at 11:20, @auschulz.bsky.social will give a talk about deep generative models - VAEs and DDPMs - for linking neural activity and behavior, at the workshop on

"Building a foundation model for the brain" (Soutana 1).
March 27, 2025 at 6:45 PM
sending everybody to this @patrickmineault.bsky.social blogpost because my rant on the apparent hubris in neuroscience is ... not as nicely worded.

www.neuroai.science/p/what-are-f...
March 22, 2025 at 12:47 PM