Nicolas Skatchkovsky
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nskat.bsky.social
Nicolas Skatchkovsky
@nskat.bsky.social
300 followers 450 following 74 posts
Computational Neuroscience & AI @ The Francis Crick Institute
Trade unionist
Posts in franglish on neuroAI & politics
Posts Replies Media Videos
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nskat.bsky.social
Nicolas Skatchkovsky @nskat.bsky.social · Jul 31
Preprint update: The new version of #SPARKS🎇 is out!
Everything's in here: sparks.crick.ac.uk
A thread on what changed 🧵👇
@flor-iacaruso.bsky.social @sdrsd.bsky.social @alexegeaweiss.bsky.social
#neuroskyence #NeuroAI #ML #BioInspiredAI
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
hopenothate.org.uk
By mimicking Reform to win back support, the Labour government is making a serious mistake. This race to the bottom emboldens Farage, punishes vulnerable people, amplifies racism, and undermines those working to hold communities together.
November 18, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
eliothiggins.bsky.social
So if AI succeeds loads of people lose their jobs as they're replaced by AI, and if AI fails, loads of people lose their jobs as the economy crashes?
carolecadwalla.bsky.social Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 7d
It’s amazing how this story has gone from 0 to 60 in UK press. There’s been no mainstream coverage to date but this morning the story is leading BBC News site & bulletins.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Google boss Sundar Pichai warns 'no company immune' if AI bubble bursts
Speaking exclusively to BBC News, CEO Sundar Pichai said the artificial intelligence boom had been an
www.bbc.co.uk
November 18, 2025 at 10:14 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social
Join us at Crick - amazing team and great colleagues to collaborate on exciting design and development projects
November 14, 2025 at 2:46 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
martinhebart.bsky.social
Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
View from your office onto Giessen and surrounding villages.
November 4, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
phineas.bsky.social
New awareness campaign
A digital poster in the style of a World War II propaganda piece. Isolaed on a yellow background, a normal, squarish, 20-something guy with glasses is sitting working on a laptop. A ghostly figure of Hitler has his arm around the guy and is grinning and shaking a fist triumphantly looking at the laptop screen. On the lid of the laptop where an apple might otherwise be is an openAI logo, bright green, and dripping green ooze down the lid. Text on the poster, in combinations of sans-serif type and brush script reads: Using Generative AI? You’re prompting with Hitler! GenAI is a Fascist Project! Try using your brain instead Don’t surrender your creativity to the tech billionaire’s control
November 3, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
marcusghosh.bsky.social
Interested in #neuroscience + #AI and looking for a PhD position?

I can support your application @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social

✅ Check your eligibility (below)
✅ Contact me (DM or email)

UK nationals: www.imperial.ac.uk/life-science...

Otherwise: www.imperial.ac.uk/study/fees-a...
A figure showing a range of neural network architectures. From Ghosh & Goodman, 2025, bioRxiv.
November 4, 2025 at 9:47 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
argalloni.bsky.social
Really enjoyed reading this short opinion piece by Tim O'Leary. I think it echoes the classic Feynman quote "what I cannot create I do not understand". I think engineering approaches such as neuromorphic computing will prove fundamental to scientific understanding of how biological brains work
darsnack.bsky.social Kyle @darsnack.bsky.social · 22d
Personal bias but I liked this transmitter article: www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

“You won’t catch an engineer trying to formulate a grand unified theory of the brain”

“Engineers know how to make things work […] This is what makes engineering closer to biology than to other […] sciences”
Neuroscience needs engineers—for more reasons than you think
Adopting an engineering mindset will help the field focus its research priorities.
www.thetransmitter.org
November 3, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
mjmoglie.bsky.social
Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information
Functional specialisation of multisensory temporal integration in the mouse superior colliculus - Nature Communications
Whether and how anatomically distinct regions of the superior colliculus (SC) exhibit specialisation in multisensory temporal integration to facilitate different behavioural responses are not fully un...
www.nature.com
November 3, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
olivia.science
> Computing has always been a seesawing discipline. We had the AI winters of the 1970s and the 1990s, and we had the dot. com crash and the ensuing “Image Crisis.” It seems another crisis is upon us. Will we ever learn? It is time for some serious thinking!

cacm.acm.org/opinion/comp...
Computing Is Indeed a Discipline in Crisis While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the AGI dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought. By Moshe Y. Vardi Posted Oct 14 2025
October 23, 2025 at 11:29 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
crick.ac.uk
Researchers at the Crick found that virgin female mice can become aggressive towards pups when hungry, but only in certain hormonal states.

It highlights the importance of understanding hormones when observing how different physical states interact in the brain.

www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-10...
Hunger influences the behaviour of female mice towards pups
Researchers find that virgin female mice can become aggressive towards pups when hungry, but only in certain hormonal states.
www.crick.ac.uk
October 22, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
ferrydanini.bsky.social
Happy Sarkozy in prison Day
leparisien.fr Le Parisien @leparisien.fr · Oct 21
L’ancien chef d’État Nicolas Sarkozy a été officiellement incarcéré ce mardi matin à la prison de la Santé de Paris. Il sera placé dans un quartier d’isolement et sera seul en cellule.
Financement libyen : l’ancien président de la République Nicolas Sarkozy incarcéré à la prison de la Santé
l.leparisien.fr
October 21, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
carlesbosch.bsky.social
Join us *next Monday*!
#CrickXrays25
X-ray #nanoimaging of biological tissues

🇬🇧🌐 @crick.ac.uk & online
tinyurl.com/crickxrays25

Sponsored by @dectris.bsky.social, @webknossos.org and @biologists.bsky.social and backed by @brukercorporation.bsky.social and Histomography
October 7, 2025 at 9:20 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
mitildide.bsky.social
So a small update on French politics for my English speaking followers the guy who had been charged with forming a government and came up with the same government than the previous government has quit this morning following the announcement of his government and is now in charge of forming a new one
October 6, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
petrznam.bsky.social
Applications for Doctoral Clinical Fellowships at the Crick, including a project in my lab, are now open! Please share widely!
crick.ac.uk The Francis Crick Institute @crick.ac.uk · Oct 1
We're looking for clinicians who are passionate about research to join our 3-year fully funded clinical PhD programme. 🔬🩺

Apply by 14 November 2025. 👇

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...
Doctoral clinical fellows
The Crick's clinical PhD programme.
www.crick.ac.uk
October 2, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
quantamagazine.bsky.social
Many AI researchers draw inspiration from neuroscience. Naomi Saphra favors a different analogy. Interpretability, in her view, should take a cue from evolutionary biology.
To Understand AI, Watch How It Evolves | Quanta Magazine
Naomi Saphra thinks that most research into language models focuses too much on the finished product. She’s mining the history of their training for insights into why these systems work the way they…
www.quantamagazine.org
September 29, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
evanbernick.bsky.social
GUESS WHAT WEEK IT IS
An incredibly chonky brown bear
September 22, 2025 at 11:12 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
olivia.science
I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai

"CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"
September 15, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
odedrechavi.bsky.social
Life in academia according to autobiographies of Nobel laureates
September 15, 2025 at 6:47 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
safekhan.bsky.social
Our pre-print is out!
Critical point drying of brain tissue for x-ray phase contrast imaging.
@apeart.bsky.social @yuxinzhang.bsky.social @jkbrmn.bsky.social @apacureanu.bsky.social @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social
@carlesbosch.bsky.social
@esrf.fr
@crick.ac.uk
bioarXiv: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Critical point drying of brain tissue for X-ray phase contrast imaging
X-ray phase contrast tomography is emerging as a powerful method for imaging large volumes of brain tissue at sub-cellular resolution. However, current sample preparation methods are largely inherited...
doi.org
September 10, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
parismarx.com
Reading about this brought to mind a piece I wrote two years ago, inspired by one of my favourite authors.

Ursula K. Le Guin emphasized that there’s a big difference “between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.” OpenAI’s AI-generated movie offers us nothing.
September 8, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
neural-reckoning.org
Is anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪
Diagram of how the "collaborative modelling of the brain" (COMOB) project started. Starting material lead to group research or solo research, coming together in online workshops (monthly) in an iterative cycle, finishing with writing up together. The diagram is illustrated with colourful cartoon blob characters.
September 4, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
scottygb.bsky.social
Hugh Bonneville started his live ITV London News interview on Downton Abbey by talking about Gaza.
September 4, 2025 at 7:12 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
lookitup.baby
Old Soviet joke for today:

A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves.

After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?”

“I’m looking for the obituaries.”

“The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.”

“Not the one I’m looking for.”
August 30, 2025 at 5:06 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Skatchkovsky
centristmum.bsky.social
The contrast in reporting these stories is nuts, right? It's not just me?
August 10, 2025 at 7:32 AM