Computer Vision News - July 2021

Ann Kennedy 41 Best of CVPR 2021 collectively computing things; whereas in flies, you might just have one neuron in the entire brain that is driving a certain behavior. You can genetically activate just that neuron and study it. It’s really a different way of building a brain. So if I say to somebody, you have the brain of a fly, that’s a serious, serious offense. [ laughs ] Sure! It means the person has only one neuron! One neuron for a given behavior. They can still do a lot with that. When observing the mice, did you ever see anything really adorable? You definitely learn a lot just from looking at the videos of the raw behavior. The work I’m doing to automate behavior detection is all based on supervised classification of behaviors we’ve defined after years of investigation. There’s a lot more that animals are doing that we’re not necessarily looking for. I don’t know if I have any great examples inmice. They are very social. There are different strains of mice that have different personalities: some are more aggressive; some are a lot more relaxed. It’s interesting realizing that these genetic backgrounds of animals have so much influence on their personalities. But even within a strain of mice that are all genetically identical to each other, you’ll have mice that are more aggressive and mice that are more submissive. The interaction between nature and nurture, genes and experiences, is really fascinating. In general, a lot of people that work on behavioral neuroscience get into it because they see animals behaving in the world, and they want to understand how that decisionmaking process works. Whatmakes animals act in a certainway?