Dylan Festa

(he/him) | Mastodon: @[email protected] | Postdoc @ Gjorgjieva lab | Italian 🇮🇹 | 🌱🍉

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

@DrPragya_Mishra Congratulations! 🎉 I am really happy for you! I wish you a long and proficient academic career!

[Julijana Gjorgjieva @GjorJulijana]

How do animals handle vast changes in their sensory environments, from the slow changes as the day goes past, to the fast changes as they move from sunlight to shade? We identify a luminance gain control in the fly visual system acting at these fast and slow timescales.

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

Our @JPhysiol review paper on assembly formation (and function) is out! The work was spearheaded by @christophmiehl and @so_onasch , with me as humble third author, and the impeccable supervision of @GjorJulijana . It was a great pleasure to be part of this project ! 🙏 🥳

[Antonia Forster @AntoniaRForster]

The most important lesson I've learned in the last year:

Burnout isn't just the result of too much work. It's the TYPE of work. And, more specifically, your emotional connection to it.

Burnout comes from feeling like no matter how much you do, it will never be enough.

[Jan Hendrik Kirchner @janhkirchner]

Could it be that 50 years from now we look back and say: "Oh boy, we used to be blind. How on earth did we miss that the small humans are *not* alright? We even put them all together, have them form little tribes and fight it out, unsupervised, Lord-of-the-Flies-style?... 1/9

[Julijana Gjorgjieva @GjorJulijana]

Very happy to see this out: we show that synaptic organization (local in the form of clustering and global on the entire dendritic tree) can emerge during development driven by spontaneous activity. Motivated by the interaction of neurotrophin molecules found experimentally

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

@CoenCagli_Lab For a #tweetprint , see the following thread:
https://t.co/bIfcKUAEQ5

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

Neural responses to the same stimulus are highly variable, how can that be explained?
Check the preprint of my work with @CoenCagli_Lab .
"Neuronal Variability Reflects Probabilistic Inference Tuned to Natural Image Statistics"
(summary 🧵 👇) https://t.co/3zzBBlifyB

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

Finally out: "Neuronal variability reflects probabilistic inference tuned to natural image statistics". Thanks a lot to @CoenCagli_Lab and the other co-authors for making this possible ! https://t.co/1NPRiBkTV8

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

A Clear-Eyed Look at Visual Perception: A Q&A with Ruben Coen-Cagli, Ph.D. | Features | Albert Einstein College of Medicine https://t.co/jGwUc08DTI

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

@shaydanur @moreisdifferent @soylent Yes, I tried Soylent bars, but then I was mostly using the drinks. A valid alternative are Huel bars. They are slightly less tasty, but still very good. And now that I am Europe, it's only Huel for me ;-)

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

When you attend a conference, but you are not presenting...
Enjoying the beach and living the (virtual) life at #cosyne2021

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

8/fin
Last but not least, a big thank you to to the other authors and collaborators for their many contributions, and for providing data! Amir Aschner, Aida Davila, Adam Konh, and Ruben Coen-Cagli (@CoenCagli_Lab)

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

Neural responses to the same stimulus are highly variable, how can that be explained?
Check the preprint of my work with @CoenCagli_Lab .
"Neuronal Variability Reflects Probabilistic Inference Tuned to Natural Image Statistics"
(summary 🧵 👇) https://t.co/3zzBBlifyB

[Dylan Festa @DylanFesta]

7/n
This shows that neural sampling can explain modulatory effects on variability, and that normative approaches based on natural input statistics can capture non-linearities in the response, such as divisive normalization.