UWATERLOO - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Scientist / Applied Brain Research Inc.
Education
2013/09 - 2019/05
Ph.D Computer Science, Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, ON
I joined the lab in May 2013 as an intern, and then started my Masters in Computer Science with the lab in September 2013. I received my BASc. (Hons) in Mechatronics Engineering with a minor in Cognitive Science from the University of Waterloo.
I am interested in how the brain creates and uses representations of space, as well as perception and mental imagery. I've been experimenting with the RatSLAM algorithm and have been working on building a similar model with spiking neurons. I'm still working on finding a specific research topic.
I joined the lab in September 2011 as a masters student in Systems Design Engineering. My undergraduate degree is in Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of Regina.
Job Titles:
- Retired ) Director of CNRG WashU. Research Professor
Having just finished my 2B term in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, I will be working for the next four months here as an undergraduate researcher.
Job Titles:
- Student in System Design Engineering
James Bergstra is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo working in the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience under Chris Eliasmith. His research has focused by turns on visual system models and learning algorithms, hyperparameter optimization, high performance computing, and music information retrieval. He moved to the University of Waterloo from Harvard University where he worked for a year in David Cox's Computer and Biological Vision lab. He completed doctoral studies at the University of Montreal in July 2011 under the direction of Professor Yoshua Bengio with a dissertation on how to incorporate complex cells into deep learning models. In the course of his graduate work he co-developed Theano, an open source optimizing compiler that can make use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for high-performance computation. He completed a Masters in 2006 under the direction of Douglas Eck on algorithms for classifying recorded music by genre.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, School of Computer Science
Job Titles:
- Motor Control
- Student in Systems Design Engineering
Pawels' research interests are in the field of low power artificial intelligent systems. His work ranges from running these systems in simulation (CoppeliaSim, Mujoco, Airsim, Pygame) to real robotics (robotic arms and drones). The low power abilities are directly due to the neuromorphic modelling approach, first outlined in the Neural Engineering Framework. The algorithms Pawel focus' on are for adaptive motor control and visual navigation. The aim for his thesis is to develop a low power visual navigation system, through the coupling of Legendre Memory Units and feature extraction, capable of multi-scale temporal processing.
Bio
I am a PhD student in the UW Department of Philosophy. I received my BA in English Literature from the University of Guelph (2010), and my MA in philosophy from the University of Waterloo (2011).
Job Titles:
- Student in Systems Design Engineering
Job Titles:
- Masters Student in Computer Science
Job Titles:
- Masters Student in Systems Design Engineering
Job Titles:
- Masters Student in Computer Science
Travis' research focuses on studying the brain's motor control system. Using modern control theoretic methods, such as operational space control, nonlinear adaptive control, and dynamic movement primitives, he has worked to develop biologically plausible spiking neural networks that model the brain, capable of generating the same diversity of behavioural phenomena and robust adaptation / learning seen in primates.
He received his undergraduate degree in computer science at Acadia University, with a thesis discussing the algebraic properties of template-guided DNA recombination. His masters degree was in computer science at the University of Waterloo, and focused on the development of the Neural Optimal Control Hierarchy (NOCH); a biologically plausible framework for large-scale models of the motor control system. His Ph.D. was in systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, where he presented the Recurrent Error-driven Adaptive Control Hierarchy (REACH) model; a large-scale, fully spiking neural model of the motor cortices and cerebellum able to account for data from 19 studies from a behavioural level down to the level of single spiking neurons.
Job Titles:
- Masters Student in Computer Science
I joined the lab in September 2013 as a PhD student in Systems Design Engineering. I received my MSc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (2013), and my BSc. (Hons) in Mathematics from Dalhousie University (2011).
I am interested in brain modelling from a systems perspective, and I'm currently working on a detailed model of coordinated eye and head movement for visual search and tracking.