The end of 2025 marked the conclusion of my 8-year tenure as Principal Investigator at Backyard Brains. It has been an immense privilege to lead this mission. We set out to make it possible for students to learn neuroscience by building spiking neural networks for robots, and I’m very excited about the final product: SpikerBot (spikerbot.backyardbrains.com). For an extraordinary example of how to teach neuroscience with SpikerBots in elementary school, see LodeLu (lodelu.com/). But this year, I'm going in a different direction. On January 1, I founded Embrained, LLC. We are developing a software platform that democratizes access to embodied AI. We produce a range of affordable robots capable of collecting large, high-quality datasets, and we design architectures that allow standard PCs to control complex agents. Embodied AI agents learn to understand your home as maps of traversable nodes. This allows us to play "Graph Games" by simply tweaking the math of the robot's world. If you increase the cost of the living room nodes, suddenly The Floor is Lava. If you drop a high reward on a specific patch of nodes, you create a Conditioned Place Preference. If you mark nodes with few neighbors as preferable, you get wall-hugging behavior (Thigmotaxis). The games you can play with your embodied AI agents are infinite. I'm betting everything on this platform. I'm looking for early adopters who want to help me test the software and build the first generation of home agents. Join me at embrained.ai/ Dr. Christopher Harris, Founder & CEO, Embrained, LLC

This one slaps ♫ youtube.com/watch?v=y4f8xgVr…

We made this for teachers

Teach the wiring of the future!

For teachers who want to teach neuroscience!

Massively grateful to everyone at the @FieldsInstitute and my dear friend @neurodidact in particular for the opportunity to participate in the Workshop on Multiscale Methods and Emergent Phenomena in Neuroscience this past week. Excellent video recordings of all talks are already available, mine here: youtube.com/watch?v=CbOJHywZ… 1 1=1

Is this robot conscious? Sign up for early access spikerbot.backyardbrains.com

This is SpikerBot. Documentation docs.backyardbrains.com/neur…

To advance foundational AI, we must solve continual learning and catastrophic forgetting. New research by our team introduces Nested Learning (NL), a paradigm that views an ML model as a system of nested optimization problems. This approach unifies architecture and optimization, creating a deeper computational capacity for learning. This is a crucial step toward creating models with the continual learning abilities seen in the human brain. More in the blog by Vahab Mirrokni and Ali Behrouz: goo.gle/47IOCjP Read the NeurIPS 2025 paper: abehrouz.github.io/files/NL.…

Ladies and gentleman they have solved the ADHD education problem

AI is becoming masterful at creating philosophical zombies - systems that mimic conscious behavior but are likely not conscious. If an AI "copies" training data, acting as though it has inner subjective experience and feelings - but doesn't - what issues might arise from that?

Some people believe consciousness will “emerge” in AI as classical neural networks grow in size and complexity, while others believe we will need more progress in our understanding of physics before #consciousAI is possible… Either way we need to be doing more research into it

We haven't tried yet, but you can probably build a neural network to play hide & seek with Neurorobot. #fens2024 #fensforum2024 @FENSorg

📣 Free NeuroRobots workshop for high-school life science teachers in/around Detroit! Reg now to test our curriculum. You'll get to use these guys in your classroom - code their behavior by building brainlike neural networks! 📅 Sat, May 25 🔗 tinyurl.com/NeuroRobotDetroi… (RT 🙏)

Really enjoyed this conversation with @EconTalker Russ Roberts. We disagree on some things but we aired our disagreements respectfully and attentively. You can watch at the URL below or listen on my @NonzeroPods feed--and this will be airing on Russ's EconTalk podcast as well.

High school life science teachers in NYC area, apply asap for this free #neuroscience prof. development workshop! Program the NeuroRobot's behavior by building neural networks akin to our own. You'll get curriculum to implement in your classroom. RT 🙏 🔗tinyurl.com/NeuroRobotNYC