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AI / Neuro

Salk Institute — computational neuroscience

Current · Terry Sejnowski lab

Courtyard and reflecting pool at the Salk Institute, La Jolla
Salk Institute, La Jolla

I work in the computational neuroscience lab of Francis Crick Chair Professor Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute.

I am currently extremely interested in mechanistic interpretability work and seeing where that pathway takes me. Here is a recent blog post of some results: Fork Around and Find Out (Part 2): One Head Does the Summing. Right now I am pursuing on a project investigating the internal representations of tactical motifs in transformer-based chess engines. One thing I am working on is developing and open sourcing an interactive visualizer app to aid interpretability research on transformer based chess engines:

Screenshots of the interactive chess engine visualizer
Screenshots of the interactive chess engine visualizer
Residual stream view
Residual stream view
Logit lens microscope view
Logit lens microscope view
Attention heads and GAB templates view
Attention heads and GAB templates view

ABCD dataset work

Big Data & Machine Learning

I spent a year leveraging unsupervised learning algorithms on massive corpuses of developmental data to investigate the behavioral, neural, and genetic (GWAS) correlates of a patient subset identified by clustering on ABCD study datasets. Publication upcoming as soon as final data set is released for research from NIH.

UCSB LEAP lab — emotional temporal coding

fMRI · MVPA & RSA

Contributed to a graduate student’s dissertation on emotional temporal coding: multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational similarity analysis (RSA), with region-of-interest masks in frontal pole and related areas (FSLeyes).

Recent books

Relevant to neuroscience

Annotated reading list

Favorite papers with notes; a rough sketch of deepest interests: