Tags / neuroscience

Projects

2023

Neuroevolution Paper gene expression, connectomes, and metalearning A few years into my mid-career pivot into science, I just landed my first published paper! What started as an idea I wrote on a napkin at the Cosyne neuroscience conference is finally out in Nature Communications: “Complex computation from developmental priors”. […] In the paper, my neuroscience collaborator Dániel and I describe how to cast neuroevolution as a metalearning problem, by treating his XOX model of connectome generation as a differentiable step in the two-stage …

2019

Biologically Plausible Backprop feedback alignment & activity perturbation in PyTorch SOAP (Second Order Activity Perturbation) is a package for experimenting with a computational neuroscience phenomenon called feedback alignment in PyTorch. It formed my project for the 3-week IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience Summer School in 2019. It relates to an important challenge in reconciling how learning works in artificial neural networks with what we know about how real neurons behave, a topic called biologically plausible back-propogation. […] When a neuron fires, its axon …