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Content creators: Marius Pachitariu, Scott Linderman, Courtney Dean, Kathryn Bonnen, Konrad Kording

Summary

The goal of the course project is to give you the opportunity to practice asking research questions and using computational tools to answer those questions. This project plan explicitly encourages the iterative nature of research as a series of questions and answers that gradually refine your hypotheses. As part of this process you will also get practical experience dealing with data, which is often a big challenge of its own when conducting research.

We have assigned you to pods based on your broad interests (neurons, fMRI, ECoG, behavior/theory). With the help of your TA, each pod will split into two groups, with the goal of making well-balanced groups. Once you’re in groups, you will start brainstorming and searching the literature for interesting papers, with the goal of forming a project question. During week 1 you will try preliminary analyses of the datasets with the goal of refining and informing your question. Week 2 day 1 (W2D1) is dedicated to projects and will teach you a general strategy for approaching projects. You will apply this strategy to your own question.

For the rest of the second week you will continue to analyze data / refine your question, with the goal of writing an abstract on W3D1, which is another project day. Your abstract may or may not include results, but it should at least include a testable hypothesis. You’ll swap abstracts with another group on W3D1 and provide/receive feedback. For the rest of the course, you will focus on getting evidence for/against your hypothesis.

Finally, in W3D5 you will meet with other groups in your pod and megapod (organized by the lead TAs), and tell them the story of your project. This is a low-key presentation that may include some of the plots you made along the way, but it is not meant as a real research presentation with high “production values”. See some of the examples to get a sense of what the presentation will look like.

Project templates

Project templates are research ideas developed by the NMA team that can be used in conjunction with the datasets we provided. Project templates can be used in a variety of ways.

Project TAs

Project TAs are your friendly dataset experts to consult with on all issues related to datasets. They can also help with other aspects of a project, including brainstorming, literature searches and coding. You will have meetings with them approximately every two days. During this time, they will help you refine your question and hypothesis into something that can be answered with our datasets. They can sometimes arrive unannounced or be late/early (busy schedules!). Please stop what you were doing to have the meeting, and then resume your work when the project TA leaves.

For the assigned meetings, project TAs will generally come only during project times, but sometimes they might need to schedule meetings slightly earlier or later. We encourage you to reach out to them for extra meetings whenever you need them, and to post questions on discord in the #dataset-X channels.

Week 1: Getting started

🗓️ W1D1

Tips:

W1D2

Continue brainstorming! Try to come up with one or a few topics of interest, either by yourselves or directly from the project templates.

It’s also really important that you start to play with the data related to your topic. One of the big challenges with these sorts of projects is actually understanding the data that you have.

W1D3-W1D5

Be on the lookout for interesting hypotheses. You might notice something unexpected in the data, and if you dig deeper it might lead you directly to a result. For this to work, you must keep an open mind about what your questions are. Here are some generally useful tips & tricks:

🗓️ W1D5 -- Looking ahead to the first project day (W2D1)

(⏱️ 30 min) -- Spend the last 30 minutes of today reflecting on the data analysis that you’ve done and the questions you’re considering. Read through the guidance below for the first project day and identify a question (of your own or from the project template) that your group would like to use during the W2D1 project tutorial and to guide your abstract writing.

Week 2: Reading, Writing, Models, and Data Analysis.

Week 2 is when projects really start to ramp up.

🗓️ W2D1: Project Half Day

Today’s project tutorial will introduce a set of general strategies to help you focus and refine your projects. You will also complete a literature review today and work on your project proposal. We have also designed an NMA system prompt to provide feedback for your project proposal by helping the LLM (whichever one is your favorite) have more context about NMA and the course goals.

TUTORIAL BLOCK TASKS

(⏱️ 1 hour) Complete the intro/tutorial/outro for W2D1:

(⏱️ 1 hour) The system prompt: getting familiar with using the NMA system prompt to get feedback on your project from your favorite LLM.

At the end of the tutorial we introduced a system prompt that can be dropped into your favorite LLM (chatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc) to provide the NMA context and help it give you better feedback for the different steps and sections of a project. Just use the LLM the way you normally would. The system prompt ensures that the LLM has access to the latest NMA context and materials, and instructs the LLM on how to be a good NMA project mentor.

(⏱️ 2.5 hours) Literature review: identify interesting papers The goal of this literature review is to situate your question in context and help you acquire some keywords that you will use in your proposal today. (The suggested timeline for the literature review is below).

⏸️ BREAK TIME!! ⏸️

PROJECT BLOCK TASKS

(⏱️ 3 hours) Project proposal

W2D3

You should now have a sense of the data, and you have probably refined your hypothesis a little. You might have a vague idea of what it would take for your project to work, what tools you might use, and what the answer could look like. Use the NMA system prompt to identify other steps you need to do for a complete project.

Keep working on analyses, making sure to relate what you do back to the project plan you created.

🗓️ W3D1: Abstract Writing Day!

One of the best ways to understand your own research is to try to write about it. You should write early and often, not just at the end when you are trying to write a paper or your thesis. Science conferences are a great way to present your intermediate work, and they give you a chance to write an abstract. However, you do not have to wait so long to write your project abstract, you will do it today! If you have preliminary results that is great, but it is not required. Most of the components of an abstract do not in fact require results. The goal for this day is to workshop your abstract with your group, and then present this to your entire pod. You can also think of it as a much more refined version of the project proposal you submitted originally.

If you think your abstract is lacking the computational “oomph” to make it sound good, check out the “W3D1 (bonus)” section below. Take the time to find interesting modeling or computational facets to your project, because this will make the abstract writing easier and more enjoyable since you can talk about big, interesting ideas and then gradually focus on the very specific work that you’ve done.

The starting point for workshopping your abstract should be getting feedback from an LLM using the NMA system prompt.

Note: the timings for this day are just suggestions. You can spend more or less time on different parts depending on how much work you think your abstract needs.

WITH YOUR GROUP

⏸️ 1 hour break ⏸️

WITH YOUR POD

BACK IN YOUR GROUP

Once you are done, please submit the abstract here. We will not use this for further matching or evaluation, but we will keep a record of it to help us track the progress of all groups. If you really need/want to, the abstract can also be submitted on Monday.

W3D1 (bonus)

Writing an abstract is also a good time to reflect on how your work relates to some of the big computational ideas in neuroscience. Relating your work to big ideas is a good way to get lots of people interested in your work! It is also a good way to find inspiration for what to do next. Maybe your question speak to one of these big ideas in neuroscience?

Here is a list of big ideas the project team put together to think about. Some of them are covered in the course material (potentially next week). Don’t be afraid to ask your TA (or project TA) if you are not familiar with some of these ideas, for example “why is sparsity such an important concept in neuroscience?”. These kinds of questions usually spark good discussions.

  1. Sparsity (paper)

  2. Mixed selectivity -- having individual neurons respond to multiple elements of a task/context/stimulus can increase the dimensionality of population activity and facilitate learning of arbitrary transformations ()paper). Modeling idea: make toy model neuron populations based on your data that show either mixed selectivity or are pure labeled lines. How do things like decoder performance (especially for combinations of signals) differ between the two populations?

  3. Predictive coding -- rather than encoding sensory input directly, it might be more efficient to encode differences between new and past sensory inputs (paper)

  4. Computing through dynamics (paper)

  5. Integrate-and-fire Network Models -- See Ch 5 of Dayan and Abbott, Theoretical Neuroscience

  6. Generative models of neural activity -- evaluate critically the assumptions made about the generative model which is implied by your analysis method. What does it mean for principles of neural coding/ behavior? E.g. does the linear decoder do as well as a nonlinear decoder - does it suggest that encoding of this variable is likely linear in this brain region?

  7. Transfer learning: can the linear (?) combination of basis sets learned from Data A be used to decode Data B? If so, then you might have found a fundamental “dictionary” of neural features (or “ensembles”, or “clusters” or “syllables”).

  8. Generalization across days or individuals -- same as the transfer learning one, but across individuals. If the generalization works, have you found a “universal” set of sufficient features for a certain task?

  9. Theories of Band Power (i.e. what is “alpha” band power associated with? what is gamma power associated with? etc.)

  10. Labeled Lines -- is information encoded by specific, dedicated neurons, or distributed across a population of cells responding to more than one thing? See for example 10.1146/annurev.neuro.26.041002.131022, Yamagata et al. (2006).

W3 Project Time

Abstract writing day should have helped you narrow down what results (positive or negative) you would actually need to answer your question. You will use the rest of this time to try to get a result, or make progress towards an answer. This might not work out in such a short time, but don’t get discouraged: this part normally takes months if not years of work.

W3D5: Final Presentations

Please see final day schedule and shared calendars for timing details: https://compneuro.neuromatch.io/tutorials/Schedule/daily_schedules.html#w3d5-final-day-of-course

This is the day where you present your project to other groups. The groups will take turns to share their screens. You can use figures and other graphics, but this is meant to be told as a story, and everyone from your group should take a turn telling a part of the story. Tell us about the different hypotheses you’ve had at different points and how you refined them using some of the tools we taught.

At the end of your last project block, you should also submit your slides via this Airtable link.

🗓️ Final Presentation Schedule

Logistics:

Content:

Questions:

References
  1. Yamagata, M., Weiner, J. A., Dulac, C., Roth, K. A., & Sanes, J. R. (2006). Labeled lines in the retinotectal system: Markers for retinorecipient sublaminae and the retinal ganglion cell subsets that innervate them. Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, 33(3), 296–310. 10.1016/j.mcn.2006.08.001