Lab News

We are putting the finishing touches on the dataset for this year's multi-agent behavior competition, launching on Kaggle in the new year! The 2025 challenge focuses on generalization: can machine learning models accurately detect and classify social interactions between two mice across diverse experimental settings?

This year’s dataset features 395 hours of tracked video of socially interacting mice, contributed by 15 different labs. All videos are top-down recordings that have been tracked using automated pose estimation tools and hand-annotated by trained experts to identify social and nonsocial behaviors, with 36 distinct behaviors annotated in total.

The challenge invites participants to leverage this multi-lab dataset to develop a foundation model for mouse social behavior—one that reliably detects meaningful interactions while remaining robust to irrelevant experimental variables, such as arena design or video framerate. Thanks to a Kaggle research grant, we are excited to offer a $50,000 prize pool for the best-performing methods.

Ryan Lu presented a poster his work modeling the neural control of swimming in the jellyfish cousin Clytia hemisphaerica!

Check out Poster session 121.13/E11: Computational Modeling of Clytia Hemisphaerica Swim Motor Neurons

Richard Gast is co-organizing a Bernstein Conference Satellite Workshop titled "Neural Diversity and Computation - Towards a Mathematical Account of Tissue Heterogeneity in the Brain".

Neurons in the brain and the synapses connecting them are inherently diverse, but most computational models of neural networks ignore this diversity, or perhaps collapse it into a handful of cell "types". This workshop strives to emphasize the importance of neural heterogeneity for modern theories of brain function and motivate new research into this exciting and upcoming topic, bringing together experts on heterogeneity in experimental and theoretical neuroscience, neuromorphic computing, and complex systems theory. Join the discussion this weekend in Frankfurt!

The lab has officially settled into its new home at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. We're excited to start working with our new colleagues in the Dorris Neuroscience Center.