[1/5] I'm very happy to share that our latest paper: “SIM: Surface-based fMRI Analysis for Inter-Subject Multimodal Decoding from Movie-Watching Experiments”, has been accepted to #ICLR2025! 🎉

Doing a demo on evaluating small language models for non-reasoning tasks (e.g. professionalize, shorten) at the amazon booth at 14:00 tomorrow at #ICLR 🇸🇬

A biologically-implausible model of the formation sulci and gyri across the human cerebral cortical mantle.

🤣

We could have AGI but our learning rates are off by 1e-15.

Very exciting 🇫🇷

Looking for a #PhD in #AI? 10 days left to apply for our project on geometric #deeplearning and #Physics-informed neural network modelling of #Alzheimer's disease progression. One International place!!! imagingcdt.com/project/disco…

MIDL is going to Paris - and hopefully you do the same! The Call for Papers is now online! See 2024.midl.io for details.

3 years ago, I was lucky enough to travel to Israel 🇮🇱 for the first time. My primary takeaway: if you think the Middle East is a black-and-white issue, you couldn't be more wrong. If you think it's complicated, it's more complicated than you could imagine. There's been plenty of talk about the war and the atrocities that have been committed. If you know me personally, you know my views on this issue are quite clear. But I'm not here to talk about that right now. My first day in Israel was quite unexpected, mostly (at first) because it rained. Believe it or not, it rains in the desert, and that completely threw off our itinerary. While our guides were figuring out a backup plan for the rain, we met our tour mates. They, surprisingly enough, were IDF soldiers that were on leave, and would be joining us for the whole trip. Despite my pro-Israel stance, I'm a generally skeptical person and immediately assumed I was going to be propagandized to death the whole trip. And, even if they weren't sent there to indoctrinate us, I assumed they'd at least be pretty biased. Even if I generally support their side of the equation, I don't like being lied to. But they were quite nice, so I went along with it for the time being. Our first destination, due to last second changes in plan from our original outdoors activities, was the Yitzhak Rabin Center, where we were to meet up with our tour mates. Rabin became an early Prime Minister of Israel after fighting in the wars of 1948. He was ultimately assassinated. What a great place to start the indoctrination, right? A memorial to a guy who is famous for fighting in the OG wars that got this country on its first legs. Walking between exhibits with a couple of the soldiers, we finally came across some information about the ongoing treatment of Palestinians in Israel. To be honest, it's really hard to get good information on this outside of seeing it for yourself, so with genuine curiousity (and a bit of hesitation in anticipation of a fiery response), I asked them about it. I firmly expected to get an answer approximating "yeah fuck 'em, they hate us." I couldn't have been more wrong. Might I remind you, Israel has mandatory conscription because pretty much every country neighboring them wants to wipe them off the face of the planet. And, among those conscripted soldiers, there was a lucky few sent to hang out with American tourists. So why wouldn't they send ones with the "right" opinions? And their response? It was filled with genuine heartache. They expressed deeply complicated feelings about the settlements (which they had actually seen, unlike most who shout vitriolic opinions). They hated the idea that their military activity caused any amount of distress to any ordinary Palestinians, whether those people wished Israelis death or not. Of course, they all hated Hamas, who obviously was the one pitting them against each other. Thank goodness this was the first day of the trip, because it opened my eyes for the rest of it. This conversation was an ongoing one throughout the whole trip. They never shied away from it. And they were always willing to play devil's advocate, steelmanning the best opinions from each side. After several days of exploring Israel, eating a ton of amazing food, meeting a ton of amazing people, and seeing a ton of amazing sights, we ended up near the border of the West Bank on the last full day of the trip, where we had similarly complicated, unfulfilling, yet enlightening conversations. In the days to come, whenever you hear the loudest, most radical voices from both sides shouting terrible things, remember that many of the actual people on the ground are humans with nuanced, compassionate voices. You won't hear that in the news, and you won't see it in the videos on Twitter that show each side trying to blast the other into oblivion. Most of the individuals that were senselessly murdered on the first day probably held pretty similar opinions. This is probably a little rambly, and I don't have much of a takeaway other than this: Think of the individuals in Gaza who just want to live a normal life. And think of individuals in Israel who want them to live that normal life.

Truly inspiring work!

Another great work from @GuoYourong and @lab_metrics presented at OHBM2023 🎉

Great work led by @lzjwilliams extending the HCP cortical parcellation to UK Biobank. Presented at @OHBM in the coming days ✌🏻🇨🇦