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Matthew Bernstein

@matthew-bernstein

Principal Scientist @ Somite AI | Computational biology and biomedical data science | Boston, MA | https://mbernste.github.io

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16.11.2024
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Latest posts by Matthew Bernstein @matthew-bernstein

Ive seen the analogy that AI is to biological intelligence as airplanes are to birds. I think that’s appropriate. And furthermore, we find that when we make better airplanes they don’t become more bird-like. We are optimizing for something that biology didn’t optimize for. I think AI will be similar

22.08.2025 13:12 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Just as the field of ML has become a distinct discipline from statistics (but have a lot of overlap… it’s a continuum), I feel like there’s a new field of AI that is diverging from ML. Again they have a lot of overlap, but the study and use of these massive AI models feels like a new thing

09.08.2025 14:58 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

2) The transition from statistical learning to agentic reasoning resembles the transition from explicit rules-based coding to statistical learning

Each transition will require an adjustment in how we approach our work

26.07.2025 14:59 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

It seems that computational work is undergoing two simultaneous transitions that resemble transitions of the past: 1) The transition from coding in a programming language to describing via natural language (AI writes the code) resembles the transition from machine code to programming languages.

26.07.2025 14:57 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

When trying to reason or prove something in a rigorous mathematical way as it relates to a real-world problem, most of the work seems to lie in developing the right formalism. Once the formalism is established, the math becomes "disinhibited" and flows more effortlessly.

28.05.2025 12:46 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
From Data to Discovery: Computational Tools for the Analysis of Spatial Genomics Data
From Data to Discovery: Computational Tools for the Analysis of Spatial Genomics Data YouTube video by Watershed Bio

Check out my recent talk on two tools I helped develop over the last few years (SpatialCorr and Monkeybread) for analyzing spatial transcriptomics data youtu.be/R8pEvndFHyo?...

28.03.2025 11:56 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Amazing (Here's the open access article: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...)

11.03.2025 16:27 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Government Biomedical data

A nice interface to track the status of various NIH websites and resources given the recent instability: stats.uptimerobot.com/Zrqh8AhvKn

02.03.2025 16:46 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Great article! I’m from South Bend :)

02.03.2025 01:50 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Screen shot of the article

Screen shot of the article

01.03.2025 10:22 👍 191 🔁 78 💬 7 📌 6
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Thrilled to share Stellaromics has raised $80M in Series B to advance 3D spatial biology & launch Pyxa! This groundbreaking platform enables unprecedented visualization & analysis of cells & molecules in thick tissue samples.
bit.ly/3QaGiRN

#Stellaromics #Pyxa #SpatialBiology

11.02.2025 13:02 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

Thanks for your perspective

12.02.2025 04:14 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Makes sense. I thought the general idea of decreasing mobility as a contributor to weakening of democracy was a compelling hypothesis. Though the cause of the decrease in mobility is probably more complicated

11.02.2025 00:48 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I read the article more as interesting “food for thought” than a completely convincing case. What was its biggest weakness in your opinion?

10.02.2025 21:28 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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How Progressives Froze the American Dream The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.

Really interesting thesis: that the decline of American democracy and prosperity is driven largely by our declining mobility. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

10.02.2025 11:47 👍 22 🔁 3 💬 7 📌 2
Controversies & Challenges in Dimensional reduction and Vizualization in Single Cell Experiments
Controversies & Challenges in Dimensional reduction and Vizualization in Single Cell Experiments YouTube video by PANORAMICS - A Vision

Check out my recent talk on dimensionality reduction, where I try to lay out my thoughts on the topic: youtu.be/AuJzMnH78wM?...

04.02.2025 02:43 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
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ResolVI - addressing noise and bias in spatial transcriptomics Technologies for estimating RNA expression at high throughput, in intact tissue slices, and with high spatial resolution (spatial transcriptomics; ST) shed new light on how cells communicate and tissu...

And here’s a tool ResolVI, part of the sci-tools family, for accounting for it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

30.01.2025 13:58 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Impact of Segmentation Errors in Analysis of Spatial Transcriptomics Data Spatial transcriptomics aims to elucidate cell coordination within biological tissues by linking the state of the cell with its local tissue microenvironment. Imaging-based assays are particularly pro...

Glad to see this issue of cell segmentation errors affecting spatial transcriptomics analysis (which most users observe) is now being investigated thoroughly: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

30.01.2025 13:57 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
What's so special about Euler's number e? | Chapter 5, Essence of calculus
What's so special about Euler's number e? | Chapter 5, Essence of calculus YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown

Much of my understanding came from his amazing video by 3Blue1Brown: www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2MI...

26.01.2025 20:06 👍 6 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0
Demystifying Euler’s number Euler’s number $e := 2.71828\dots$ has, to me, always been a semi-mysterious number. While I understood many facts about $e$, I never felt I ever truly understood what it really was – it’s core essenc...

Here's a blog post on Euler's number: a constant I only ever partially understood despite it appearing in equations across all of math and science: mbernste.github.io/posts/eulers...

26.01.2025 20:05 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

Saw this in a display at the MIT Museum, which is a great museum!

11.01.2025 22:03 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Pink Chicken Project Pink Chicken Project suggests changing the colour of the entire species Gallus gallus domesticus to pink - using the recently invented CRISPR gene-drive technique.

More of an art project than science project, The Pink Chicken project is thought provoking nonetheless pinkchickenproject.com#what

11.01.2025 22:00 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

It’s crazy to me that this works

08.01.2025 23:16 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Cells don’t interact in just 2 dimensions—so why study them that way?

In 2D spatial analysis, critical interactions between cell types can be underestimated, leading to distorted biological insights.

#3DSpatial #SpatialBiology #research

Image from from Sui et al., bioRxiv

07.01.2025 18:52 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Cells transport proteins in membrane vesicles.

These vesicles are formed by self-assembled exoskeleton.

The exoskeleton scaffolds are cuboctahedrons made of proteins.

Life is amazing!

06.01.2025 15:38 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 0
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Genetic Analysis of a Sarcoma Accidentally Transplanted from a Patient to a Surgeon | NEJM Modern concepts of cancer immunology originated from the classic observations by Jensen, Loeb, Tyzzer, and Little in the early years of the 20th century of the rejection of transplanted allogeneic ...

Bizarre story.

Genetic Analysis of a Sarcoma Accidentally Transplanted from a Patient to a Surgeon | New England Journal of Medicine www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

05.01.2025 18:03 👍 11 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 1

“The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.” ~ Edsger Dijkstra

26.12.2024 15:03 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Cognitive load is what matters There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.

Good software engineering requires understanding human cognition to reduce cognitive load. I think all the fancy paradigms are just ways to accomplish this.

minds.md/zakirullin/c...

26.12.2024 15:02 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
What is a Pixel? (and what is a point sample) When we talk about image-based graphics, we talk about it being a regular collection (usually a grid) of samples (or pixels). It’s time to be a little more precise about this. The term pixel is (I’m t...

As someone new to image analysis, I recently came upon this perspective that seems trivial, but is actually important: A pixel is a "point sample" and not a little square. A pixel is a data point, sampled from the world, like any other data point would be. pages.graphics.cs.wisc.edu/559-f14/2014...

20.12.2024 12:31 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I’ve seen your work showing the brittleness and misuse of these approaches. It’s very important work! Though I also think it’s really fascinating that such velocity information is there at all (even if it’s too noisy for practical application)

20.12.2024 10:57 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0