News

October 2024

It was fanstastic to have Amber Brands from Iris Groen's lab at University of Amsterdam visit the lab and present her work on computational modeling and the neural mechanisms of temporal dynamics in the human visual cortex. We all hope to see Amber in Giessen again soon!

We're super excited to welcome our first postdoc, Zhengqing Miao (John), to the lab. John will be contributing his extensive computational modeling expertise to the DEEPFUNC project, which focuses on understanding functional specialization in the human visual cortex. Welcome, John!

September 2024

Elah, Lenny and Katha will join the NEAT workshop in Osnabrück. Elah has even been selected for a flash talk! We're excited to get new input in the field of Neuro-AI, reconnect with old friends and make some new ones.

August 2024

Our lab had four poster presentations at this year's ECVP in Aberdeen. Elah, Hilal, Lenny and Sule each presented their work. Well done, everyone!

After ECVP, Hilal will be off to an extended visit to work with Rachael Jacks and Philippe Schyns in the Centre for Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at University of Glasgow. Have fun, Hilal!

July 2024

Katha is a mentor at the awesome Neuromatch Academy for the NeuroAI course. It's great to interact with so many kind, smart and motivated students across the world. 

The lab had a great time at the SFB Categorization workshop, which was orgnanized by Ben de Haas, Martin Hebart, Daniel Kaiser, Melissa Võ and Katha. We had fantastic speakers from all over the world joining us: S.P. Arun, Moshe Bar, Yuki Kamitani, Angelika Lingnau and Marisa Nordt. The workshop was a full success!

June 2024

Katha just returned from a great trip to Amsterdam to give a lecture about "Functional specialization in minds, brains and AI, and asking 'why' questions" in the Neuro-AI summer school. It was a lot of fun to meet and discuss with so many smart and interested students.

Anastasia has finally arrived in Giessen from the US and is starting as a new PhD student in our lab. She is the first official PhD student to kickstart the DEEPFUNC project! Welcome to the lab, Anastasia!

We just returned from a wonderful trip to Berlin for Katha's Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize Award Ceremony. It was so much fun to celebrate in the capital.

Katha contributed to an excellent public article in the The Transmitter, written by George Musser, about using deep neural networks to better understand the brain.

May 2024

The VCCN lab has four accepted papers at the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) this year, yay! We cannot wait to present our work in Boston in August!

We're thrilled that our research highlight 'Artificial Intelligence meets body sense: Task-driven neural networks reveal computational principles in the proprioceptive pathway' co-authored by Lenny, Frank Bremmer and myself, based on a recently published paper in Cell, has been accepted in the Nature journal, Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy!

April 2024

Hilal was awarded the FoVea Travel and Networking Award to cover the costs for attending VSS! Congratulations, Hilal. We're so proud to have you in the lab!

March 2024

Katha just received the Heinz Maier-Leibniz Prize from the DFG! One of the most important awards for researchers in early stages of their career. It also comes with 200k Euros to do more exciting science, yay! What a month!

Katha was invited to present her work about "Visual Cognition in Humans and Machines" in the Computer Science department at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Sule is attending the prestigious Machine Learning Summer School in Okinawa. Congratulations and have fun in Japan, Sule!

Sophia just won a Master scholarship from The Adaptive Mind (TAM) project for her thesis "Exploring the Impact of Scene Information on Rapid Face Detection: A Neurocomputational Approach". Congratulations, Sophia!

February 2024

Hilal's abstract "Idiosyncratic facial motions: Uncovering identity information in facial movements through a landmark-based analysis" was accepted as poster presentation at VSS 2024. Well done!

Katha gave a talk on 'A computational approach to understanding the functional architecture of the human visual mind and brain' at the Center for Cognitive Science at Technical University Darmstadt.

January 2024

Katha was invited to give a talk on 'Visual Cognition in Humans and Machines' in the Computer Science department at Ulm University.

December 2023

Katha gave an invited talk on 'How do real-world task demands shape the functional architecture of the visual system?' at The New VISTAs in Vision Research Conference at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Hilal submitted an abstract on landmark-based analyses of face motion to VSS 2024! Fingers crossed!

October 2023

Katha gave an invited lecture on 'Using deep neural networks to understand why face perception works the way it does' in the Sensory Sciences Lecture Series at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. 

Katha gave a keynote talk, and our lab presented four posters at the CMBB day in Giessen. Go VCCN lab!

September 2023

The lab has just been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for our proposal DEEPFUNC "Using deep neural networks to understand functional specialization in the human visual cortex". We're overly excited and looking forward to 5 years of fun research!

Lenny has joined the lab as a new PhD student and will be co-supervised by Martin Hebart. Welcome aboard, Lenny! Additionally, Lenny has just secured a fellowship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Congratulations!

August 2023

Our lab has just submitted 4 abstracts to the CMBB day. Congratulations to Elaheh, Hilal, Pranjul and Sule! And Katha will give a keynote. We're all looking forward to a fun day full of science and discussions about mind, brain and behavior.