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Posts
Restricted Boltzmann Machines for Interpretable Neuroimaging
Published:
This post is a write-up of a seminar report I wrote during my M.Sc. in Life Science Informatics at the University of Bonn, for the “Visualization and Medical Image Analysis” seminar at b-it (WiSe 2019/20): Using Generative-Discriminative Learning in Neuroimaging for Interpretable Predictions. The full report is linked at the bottom; this is the part of it I still think about most, Restricted Boltzmann Machines, and why a fairly old, physics-flavored idea turned out to be a useful tool for making neuroimaging classifiers less of a black box.
Prosopagnosia: When Faces Refuse to Stick
Published:
There is a particular kind of disorientation in not recognizing a face you’ve seen a hundred times: a colleague, a neighbor, sometimes even your own reflection in a photograph. This is prosopagnosia, or face blindness, the inability to recognize faces despite otherwise normal vision and intact intelligence. The name comes from the Greek prosopon (face) and agnosia (not knowing), and it was first described by the neurologist Joachim Bodamer in 1947.
Modeling Why the Necker Cube Won’t Sit Still
Published:
Most write-ups of visual illusions stop at showing you the picture: here’s a cube that flips, isn’t the brain weird. That’s true but incomplete, it doesn’t say why perception should flip at all, rather than just settling on one interpretation and staying there, or why the flips arrive when they do rather than on some fixed schedule. This post builds a small computational model of exactly that switching process, for the Necker cube specifically, and asks whether a handful of very simple neural dynamics can reproduce the statistical signature of real perceptual switching.
Extracting the Most Predictive Subgraphs from the Human Connectome
Published:
This post is a summary of my Master’s thesis, Extracting Most Predictive Subgraphs From Models of Human Brain Connectivity, submitted in November 2020 for my M.Sc. in Life Science Informatics at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT), University of Bonn. Examiners: Prof. Dr. Thomas Schultz and Prof. Dr. Holger Fröhlich; advisor: Mohammad Khatami. The full PDF is linked at the bottom.
Combined EEG-fNIRS Pipeline: Multimodal Neuroimaging from Recording to Analysis
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EEG measures the scalp potential generated by synchronised postsynaptic currents in cortical pyramidal neurons. It has millisecond temporal resolution but poor spatial resolution, and the signal is smeared by the skull and scalp.
Blender Python Scripting for Visual Effects
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Blender ships with a full Python API (bpy) that exposes nearly every feature of the interface: object creation, material nodes, particle systems, geometry nodes, and rendering.
MEG Beamforming: Forward and Inverse Problems
Published:
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) measures the tiny magnetic fields produced by synchronised postsynaptic currents in cortical neurons. Compared to EEG, MEG is less distorted by the skull and scalp, giving it better spatial resolution.
Generating Structural Connectomes from the Human Connectome Project
Published:
The Human Connectome Project (HCP) provides high-quality diffusion MRI data for over 1,000 healthy young adults, acquired at 3T with 1.25 mm isotropic resolution and 90 gradient directions at b=3000 s/mm^2.
Crossing and Kissing Fibers in Fiber Tractography
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One of the central challenges in diffusion MRI tractography is that a single imaging voxel is 2-3 mm on a side, yet contains thousands of axons that may run in completely different directions.
Advanced Interactive Visualization in DIPY with FURY
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DIPY uses FURY (Fast Unified Renderer for You) as its 3D visualization engine. Beyond static screenshots, FURY supports interactive scenes with sliders, opacity controls, and video export.
Parallel Transport Tractography with DIPY
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Parallel Transport Tractography (PTT) is a probabilistic tracking algorithm that frames fiber propagation as a curve evolving along a parallel transport frame. Compared to simpler deterministic methods, PTT better handles fiber crossings and produces smoother streamlines.
GPU-Accelerated Tractography with DIPY and cuslines
Published:
For whole-brain tractography the bottleneck is usually the inner tracking loop: at each step you evaluate a model, sample a direction, and move the streamline. DIPY supports offloading this to GPU via the cuslines library.
Introduction to Local Fiber Tracking with EuDX
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Local tractography follows fibers step by step, estimating the local fiber direction at each point from an ODF model. This tutorial covers a full end-to-end local tracking pipeline using DIPY: ODF fitting, stopping criteria, seeding, and the EuDX algorithm.
Groupwise Bundle Registration with DIPY
Published:
When comparing white matter bundles across subjects, they first need to be coregistered to a common space. DIPY’s groupwise_slr function does this without requiring a pre-defined atlas.
Reslicing Diffusion MRI Datasets to Isotropic Voxels
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Many diffusion MRI acquisitions use anisotropic voxels, for example 2 x 2 x 3 mm. This can cause issues downstream in tractography and registration algorithms that assume isotropic spatial resolution.
Getting Started with DIPY
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DIPY is an open-source Python library for the analysis of diffusion MRI data. In this first tutorial I walk through the basics: loading data, building a gradient table, and visualizing axial slices.
Minimally Recognizable Configurations (MIRCs)
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“Minimal Recognizable Configurations Elicit Category-selective Responses in Higher Order Visual Cortex” introduces the concept of Minimal Recognizable Configurations (MIRCs), as presented by Shimon Ullman et al. A MIRC is defined as the smallest visual configuration of image components that remains reliably recognizable as belonging to a specific category.
Perception of Mooney faces
Published:
PDF of the paper Perception of Mooney Faces: Extreme Generalization through Inverse Rendering.
Visit to M2L Summer School
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So, I have travelled to multiple conferences as a part of my research career, but the M2L summer school 2025 (8-12 September 2025) was a bit special for me. I enjoyed every bit of the Summer School. It was super exciting to visit the Mediterranean countries and also see the enthusiasm of undergraduates. Before the summer school started, we got an invitation to the slack and also the whole schedule of the summer school which was nothing short of great!
SfN Neuroscience Chapter
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So after ICLR 2025 in Singapore, I visited the SfN (Society for Neuroscience Chapter) in Singapore at the A* Star institute which was nothing beyond amazing. The facilities at the institute were world class and I got to meet some of the best researchers in Neuroscience there, and alongside present my work! I was happy to have 20 people at my poster with great discusssions about something new that we were putting forward. I am glad I got the chance to visit Singapore for this conference as it was once in a lifetime opportunity for me!
My experience at ICLR 2025
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Welcome to my personal recap of attending ICLR 2025 in Singapore! This write-up blends my reflections, highlights from the conference, and a bit of travelogue from one of the most exciting tech and research hubs in the world.
Audio and Text Alignment
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In Neuroimaging language experiments it is often required that an orthographic transcript of the text is well aligned with the audio.
The beauty of Physics
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All science enthusiasts are like wanderers in a field who try to unravel the secrets of nature. Human curiosity is inbuilt and we all have innate desire to discover the world around us and be informed! Physics is the fundamental science branching into narrow pathways leading scientific discovery of the unimaginable, the unexpected, the exciting and electrifying.
Music and Neurogenesis
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So what is Neurogenesis? Neurogenesis is the process by which neurones are generated from neural stem cells and progenitor cells. The generation of neuronal cells in the hippocampus is responsible for memory as well as emotions. Every day our brain is generating new cells (about 700 on an average) which encode our memories and the emotions follow with what we associate that particular memory with.
First Conference at BCCN Berlin
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As an undergrad, it was the first time I got a chance to attend a conference. It was the Bernstein Computational Neuroscience Conference and the International Conference on Computational Neuroscience which was held from 11–12 October 2017 at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Humboldt University of Berlin). It was an enriching experience for a novice like me to get acquainted with ideas of the top researchers in the field. Almost like a dream come true for me.
The Unfathomable Power of Information
Published:
A machine is something which performs automated tasks , making a machine perform is like making a baby learn how to do something ; be it walking, dancing etc. Humans have always wanted to reduce their own efforts and augment the powers of the machine in order to make things faster, efficient and reduce their redundancy. It is information which passes on from something which is able to think to something which may or may not be able to itself perform a particular task or conjecture upon and analyse it. Giving machines the information is all that we’ve been doing; be it through electrical impulses,mechanical impulses or other methods.
portfolio
Awards
Published:
- STIBET 1 Scholarship for international students (July-Nov. 2020), awarded by DAAD and the German foreign office to support my master’s thesis.
- 1st position at BR41N.io Designer’s Hackathon, Data Analysis for project on EcoG Hand Pose Estimation (29-30 Apr. 2022).
- Golden Jubilee Award of Excellence in Sciences, Miranda House, University of Delhi (2018).
- Professor Savitri G Burman award, Miranda House, University of Delhi (2017).
- G.Bhaskar Memorial Award, Delhi Public School RKPuram (2014).
- Gold medal for academic excellence, Delhi Public School RKPuram (2014).
- Red Tie for excellence in the field of technology, Delhi Public School RKPuram (2014).
Additional Training Courses
Published:
- High-Performance Data Analytics I, GWDG (20-21 Mar. 2022)
- NVIDIA GPU Programming Bootcamp organized in cooperation with Max Planck Computing Faculty (19-20 Oct. 2021) View Certificate
- Python for High-Performance Computing organized by Max Planck Computing Faculty (5-7 Oct. 2021)
- Sage Days 100, Department of Informatics, University of Bonn (22 July 2019-27 July 2019)
Conferences and Memberships
Published:
- Member, Women in Machine Learning Society (2023, 2024), sponsored by WiML for attending ICLR 2023.
- Member, Cognitive Science Society (2023, 2024) and reviewer, Cognitive Science Society (2024).
- Attendee and Poster Presenter, Cognitive Science Society meeting 26-29 July 2023 link to the poster presentation is here: mooney faces.
- Attendee and Presenter Graphics Vision and Machine Learning graphics.
- Poster Presentation Neuro AI talks in Osnabrück, organized by Tim Keatzmann Lab (2023).
- Attendee, at the International Symposium on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization (VMV).
- Presented a poster at the ICLR 2025 Re-Align workshop on the paper titled ‘Computer Graphics from a Neuroscientist’s perspective’
- Will be attending the M2L summer school in Split Croatia.
Reviewing Experience
Published:
- CogSci 2023
- CogSci 2024
- CogSci 2025
- Unireps workshop, Neurips 2024
- ACVSS 2025 (reviewed applications for the summer school)
- ICMI 2025 (3 papers reviewed)
- Unireps workshop 2025, Neurreps workshop 2025
posters
publications
A meta-analysis of mental rotation in the early years of life
Published in Developmental Science Journal, 2023
Mental rotation, the cognitive process of moving an object in mind to predict how it looks in a new orientation, is coupled to intelligence, learning, and educational achievement. On average, adolescent and adult males solve mental rotation tasks slightly better (i.e., faster and/or more accurate) than females. When such behavioral differences emerge during development, however, remains poorly understood. Here we analyzed effect sizes derived from 62 experiments conducted in 1705 infants aged 3–16 months. We found that male infants recognized rotated objects slightly more reliably than female infants. This difference survives correction for small degrees of publication bias. These findings indicate that gender differences in mental rotation are small and not robustly detectable in the first months of postnatal life
Download here
Perception of Mooney Faces: Extreme Generalization through Inverse Rendering?
Published in Cognitive Science Society, 2023
Humans can successfully interpret images even when significant image transformations have distorted them. Such images aid in differentiating existing computational models for perception because models that predict similar results for typical stimuli may diverge when confronted with atypical stimuli. We propose an explanation of people’s ability to perceive a specific class of degraded stimuli that require extreme generalization capabilities: Mooney, or two-tone images of faces.
Download here
Processing of scene intrinsics in the ventral visual stream for object recognition
Published in Cognitive Science Society, 2023
A hallmark of human vision is the ability to rapidly recognize objects in a complex naturalistic scene. However, the exact mechanisms behind the computational invariance of object recognition remain unknown. In this study, we investigate object constancy by estimating how the ventral visual stream processes shading, shadows, textures, and specularities.
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Building an Image Database with Searchable Metadata
Published in Computational Life Sciences - Data Engineering and Data Mining for Life Sciences, 2023
This chapter describes the process of building an Image Database with searchable metadata. Searching for an image greatly benefits from having useful metadata to accompany it. The proposed solution allows the user to save the picture together with its online location (url) and suitable metadata. The application then saves both the picture and its metadata in a SQLite database. This database can be queried and is accessible via a RESTful API service.
Download here
Genetic Influences on the Developing Young Brain and Risk for Neuropsychiatric Disorders
Published in Journal of Biological Psychiatry, 2023
Imaging genetics provides an opportunity to discern associations between genetic variants and brain imaging phenotypes. This review summarizes findings from imaging genetics studies spanning from early infancy to early childhood, with a focus on studies examining genetic risk for neuropsychiatric disorders.
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AMOR: Ambiguous Authorship Order
Published in SIGBOVIK 2024, 2024
This paper addresses the contentious issue of author ordering in scientific publications. The authors propose AMOR, a probabilistic system that randomly shuffles the author list each time a paper is viewed, eliminating distinctions such as co-first or co-middle authorship. Presented at SIGBOVIK 2024.
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When Large Language Models are More Persuasive Than Incentivized Humans, and Why
Published in arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09662, 2025
This study compares the persuasiveness of large language models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and DeepSeek v3) against incentivized human persuaders in real-time conversations. Results show that LLM persuasive superiority is context-dependent, varying with the truthfulness of persuasion attempts, the model used, and diminishing with repeated interactions.
Download here
Computer Graphics from a Neuroscientist’s Perspective
Published in Second Workshop on Representational Alignment at ICLR 2025, 2025
A hallmark of human vision is to recognize objects in complex naturalistic scenes. This study proposes a tool to investigate human perception by using a computer graphics approach, using three-dimensional object meshes to render synthetic scenes and study how these scenes are represented in the brain.
Download here
talks
Conference Proceeding talk 3 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
Published:
This is a description of your conference proceedings talk, note the different field in type. You can put anything in this field.
teaching
Teaching Assistantship
Graduate Course, Bonn Aachen International Center for Information Technology, 2020
Summer Semester 2020
Intern Supervision
Graduate intern, Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, 2022
I supervised Elizaveta Ivanova, M.Sc., HSE University for a period of two months to work on application development for questionnares in Cognitive Neuroscience.
Teaching Assistantship
Graduate Course, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nüremberg, 2024
Winter Semester 2024
I held a lecture on Neuroimaging: An Overview for the course Computational Visual Perception under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Egger.