A couple of weeks ago I had the honour to attend and present my recent work at the Brain Conference: Frontiers of Theoretical Neuroscience [ official website ] that took place in Rungsted Kyst in Denmark. I was also fortunate enough to get awarded a travel scholarship to participate.
The Brain Conferences are a series of conferences on neuroscience organised by the Lundbeck foundation taking place bi-annually, usually at Rungstedgaard in the east of Denmark1. This iteration was organised by Larry Abbott, Ila Fiete, and Haim Sompolinsky and was focused on Theoretical Neuroscience.
One of the highlights of the conference for me was the poster by the very talented Samuel Liebana from UCL (see picture below), presenting his recent paper on how dopamine dynamics explain the emergence of different behavioural strategies in mice.
I got really excited about this work, not only because incidentally it happened to be the very first poster I visited in that meeting, but also because it is very closely related to a project I’ve been developing and pitching since December 2024. The idea is to study learning dynamics in a continual learning setting and explain how prior structure resulting from previously learned task explains the emergence of diverse behavioural strategies.
At the time, the researchers I reached out to didn’t seem especially interested in the idea, or so it seemed from their reactions. But perhaps now, with growing experimental momentum in this direction, interest will be rekindled, and people will get more easily convinced.
Footnotes
At that part of Denmark that is technically Sweden.↩︎