This week I got an invitation that threw me off. It was from a colleague who I respect and who's work I like. The email said that a PhD student is due to graduate, and because of the university rules they needed a woman on the committee. Could I please do it? There was no information about the title of the thesis, the name of the student, the other members of the committee, and most importantly, WHY they wanted me on the panel (besides the obvious fact that they needed a woman). I dwelled on the reply for a long time, thinking that I should probably tell the sender why the email was extremely disrespectful to someone who is an expert in their field (Neuroscience! Vision!), but in the end I was too tired to. I just said no, I am too busy to be your token woman.
By Karin
This week I got an invitation that threw me off. It was from a colleague who I respect and who's work I like. The email said that a PhD student is due to graduate, and because of the university rules they needed a woman on the committee. Could I please do it? There was no information about the title of the thesis, the name of the student, the other members of the committee, and most importantly, WHY they wanted me on the panel (besides the obvious fact that they needed a woman). I dwelled on the reply for a long time, thinking that I should probably tell the sender why the email was extremely disrespectful to someone who is an expert in their field (Neuroscience! Vision!), but in the end I was too tired to. I just said no, I am too busy to be your token woman.
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By Karin
Sarah has been working on a project investigation the neural responses to targets in visual clutter. She has worked on this project since joining my lab in 2017, and we just found out that it has been accepted for publication in PNAS. This is such good news, and we will share the pdf once approved for public release. By Yuri
We are close to settling the final data analysis for Malin's forthcoming paper about target pursuit behaviour in male hoverflies. I have tried to understand how two data (e.g., fly speed against bead speed) correlate with each other using functions in Matlab, xcorr and corrcoef. I got confused by the outcomes from those two functions, even reading through function documents in the Matlab help centre; watching youtube videos. They made me more confused, somehow. To solve this, I googled 'cross-correlation vs correlation coefficient'. As usual, someone had already faced the same question and sought help 10 years and 1 month ago. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6284676/a-question-on-cross-correlation-correlation-coefficient The best answer I have got there was 'I seriously think you need to read up more on cross-correlation functions & correlation coefficient from a statistics book, because your confusion here is more fundamental than related to MATLAB'. Shame on me! I found excellent explanations of the correlation coefficient on this web pages too. https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/correlation-coefficient-formula/ Karin's lines of code eventually let me achieve the calculations. The result is stunning, and we all are excited to share them as a publication soonish. By Raymond
One of the biggest challenges in software development is having access to the user, without them there is no way of knowing how they expect the software to work or what they expect it to do. Developing without communicating back and forth with the user can lead to software that is hard to understand and inconvenient to use. In order to avoid this problem, I continually ask myself the same question, Is this what the user wanted and how are they expecting it to work? Sometimes this is a simple question to answer, other times it can't be resolved without detailed discussion with the user. Luckily for me, the intended users of the Tethered Flight Arena are always within reach and willing to share their opinions, the feedback they provide combined with discussion of the online documentation has been invaluable and helped to keep me focused on designing the software they want. So far the Tethered Flight Arena is progressing at a steady pace. We are able to use DeepLabCut live to analyse a video of a tethered hoverfly and track its wings, this data is then streamed directly into Unity via a socket. This provides an accurate simulation of the real time data capture we hope to achieve, and will eventually allow a real tethered animal to control a virtual animal within the Unity scene. Within the Tethered Flight Software (Unity Project), the user can create Trials which are used to set a variety of basic settings such as the scene being shown and for how long, They can also create and play through sequences which are a series of trials. Users can also add interventions to trials which allow them to perform certain actions such as moving, showing or hiding an object within the scene, these interventions can be set to trigger after a certain duration or once the virtual animal navigates within the set proximity to a particular object. Finally, interpolations can be added to a sequence, which allows for a particular object or setting to be modified across all the trials within the sequence. E.g. Linearly interpolate the virtual animal's start position from the ground to 5m above the ground across 5 trials. As progress is continually made I'm getting more and more eager to see a tethered hoverfly interacting with the virtual world in real time, but for now I hope to keep asking questions and provide the user with the software they want. Next I will be working on saving the collected data and allowing the user to replay previous trials from this saved data. In my next post I aim to provide a video which demonstrates some of the Tethered Flight project's functionality.
I try to borrow their awe and fascination (and appreciation of my desk) when I run low. My work place might not alway fill me with an immense sense of joy but apparently it allures all the small people and creatures of my home.
By Joseph
One by-product of the ridiculous model of scientific publishing that we are currently held to is the emergence of predatory publishers. Predatory publishers are organisations who create "fake" scientific journals with the goal of publishing articles from real scientists, in order to claim publication fees. The difference between these journals and "real" journals is that there is next to no peer review involved, and the journals will publish almost anything as long as someone is willing to pay the fees (although some "real" journals are not that different). Of course since these journals are just made up, they tend to advertise themselves directly to scientists, sending professional looking emails inviting you to submit an article to one of their upcoming emails. In attempt to avoid looking like spam they have bots which find your recent publications, and they work these into their automated emails to grab your attention. Over the years I have had a few ridiculous invitations to submit papers in completely irrelevant journals, such as my offer to join the editorial board of the American Journal of Traffic Engineering. But I got a new offer this week that sparked my interest. The "editor" wrote me asking: "I wonder if you could submit a short review or a short commentary (or any type of article) based on your previous article “Author Correction: Spike bursting in a dragonfly target-detecting neuron”." This was a very brief correction to fix a typo in the reference section of a recent paper of mine. I decided to respond to their offer by asking the editor for clarification on which part of our reference typo correction I should focus my article on, in order to make sure my article was enticing to their journals readership. Curious to see how far this fake editor will go to get their hands on this exciting and impactful article. By Yuri I ran tutorials for a lecture series on sensory motor systems this semester. Students and I studied how our eyes and brains receive and process information from our surroundings in Karin's lectures. We ultimately learned that visual perception depends on background, surroundings, context, experience, perceptual awareness, etc. It is why we see various visual illusions such as the Kanizsa triangle or square by forming illusory contours on neurons of V1 (primary visual cortex) and V2 (secondary visual cortex) in our brain. When prepared tutorial materials, I came across a fascinating study entitled 'If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus)'. This study investigated whether cats are susceptible to sitting in illusory enclosures, utilizing cats' attraction to box-like spaces to assess their perception of the Kanizsa square visual illusion. This study revealed that cats selected the Kanizsa illusion just as often as the square and more often than the control, indicating that domestic cats may treat the subjective Kanizsa contours as they do actual contours. I was firstly impressed by the innovative idea to use cats as subjects and their well-known phenomenon, loving square, for the fundamental neuroscience research. Secondly, this study was carried out together with citizen science participants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 500 pet cats and cat owners conducted the six daily trials. Thirty cats completed all tests, and nine cats selected at least one stimulus by sitting within the contours (illusory or actual) with all limbs for at least three seconds. I found these successful nine cats are outstanding, and those three seconds are incredibly long and worth as hours after I tried the trials with my cat. My cat loves sitting in a box and on piles of paper on my desk like other cats. But on Day 1, she could not stop walking towards me and did not notice the existence of the stimuli at all. It may be because she loves me more than squares; or needs cuddles after being lonely for a day. Thus, I tried the trials over the weekends, when she usually wants to have a little more privacy. She eventually has started to sit on the mat and come closer to the stimuli, but very randomly. She has NEVER sat in the Kanizsa square, even in an actual square. The result of my cat indicates that the success rate of this study (9/ 30/ 500) is super accurate. Anyway, working with my cat is really enjoyable and I just want to share how adorable my cat is. By Raymond
This week was my first time presenting at journal club. While I was nervous, I was mainly concerned about how interested the other lab members would be in hearing about my honours project. Luckily, the presentation seemed to go smoothly, and I received a lot of thoughtful questions and useful feedback. Since joining the Hoverfly Vision Lab several months ago, it has been great getting to know everyone within and outside the lab, as well as experience the enthusiasm they have for their work. The consistent appearance of new and exciting challenges has made the months feel like weeks, it has also made me thankful for the work done by previous lab members like Richard, which has helped to make these challenges manageable. I am also thankful for the constant support by current lab members who are always willing to help and explain the complexity of hoverfly vision and behaviour. As I come to the end of a long but valuable honours degree in computer science, I am mostly looking forward to being able to further develop my skills as a software engineer by solving real world problems. However, I never imagined that this would lead me to a closed-loop VR system for hoverflies, an amazing project that I hope to share more about in the future. Hi, I am Chris
I’m currently working as a software engineer helping to develop a real-time closed-loop VR system for hoverflies using Machine Learning to estimate pose positions of the most forward facing edge of the wings and extrapolate how they want to move in a 3 dimensional space. As for who I am as a person, I’m a Geek at heart with a love for video games and science fiction. I recently graduated University with an Honours Degree in information Technology (Digital Media), I was also awarded the University Medal for outstanding academic achievement. I’m also a 3D artist, I'm currently working with a developer group based in France to develop mods and games based around my all time favourite franchise Stargate. For developing our games we strictly use Unreal engine as our engine of choice due to the ease of use, trove of information and tutorials available along with what everyone is familiar with. By Sarah Yesterday, I ventured up to the Wittunga Botanic Gardens, in search of a few Eristalis tenax to replace our ageing breeders. Even though it was not ideal conditions being slightly overcast, windy and cool, and not all of the most popular daisy bushes were flowering, I still managed to catch 3 males. These lucky boys have now taken up residence with a group of laboratory bred females, hopefully we will see lots of fertile egg clutches in the coming weeks and months!! I have included some pictures I took yesterday, including some of the recent new additions to Wittunga It is truely a beautiful spot to visit and only 5-10 minutes drive from Flinders. |
Hoverfly Vision
The hoverfly vision group can be found at 2 locations: At Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and at Uppsala University in Sweden. Archives
January 2022
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