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Dan Goodman Sep 1, 2023

I'm currently developing a new course "Neuroscience for machine learners" that I hope to be able to make publicly available, and I'd love to hear what you think should be in it.

It's aimed at people with a machine learning background to learn a bit about neuroscience. My thinking is that neuroscience and ML have had fruitful links in the past, and may again in the future (although right now they're drifting apart). This course is designed to give students the background they'd need to be able to discover, understand and make use of new opportunities arising from neuroscience (if they do). I'm not trying to tell them only about the bits of neuroscience that we already think are applicable to ML, but to give them enough background to read and understand enough neuroscience to allow them to make new discoveries about what might be applicable to ML. The constraint is that it can't just be an intro to neuro course I think, because I'm not sure how compelling that would be to students with an ML focus. The course is 10 weeks and will have quite a practical focus, with most of the attention on weekly coding based exploratory group work rather than lectures. (Similar to @neuromatch Academy.)

I have thoughts about what should be on this course, but I'd love to know what you all think would be most relevant.

#neuroscience #compneuro #machinelearning #ai

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Chris Rodgers Sep 1, 2023

@neuralreckoning @neuromatch In my opinion, the classic way to teach intro neuro is a bit reductionist bc the students spend weeks on molecular and biophysical principles (eg Hodgkin Huxley) before they get to systems neuro, if ever. This could be a good chance to invert that and start out with the kind of neuro that a lot of us love — large scale circuits and computations, based fundamentally on information theory and signal processing. Maybe focus some of the assignments around analyzing big datasets? Challenge with this approach might be to keep it grounded in behavior or biology and not just a data mining exercise

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Dan Goodman

@chrisXrodgers @neuromatch oh that's an interesting idea! I definitely plan to get them to look at big datasets as this seems like a great way to keep it interesting and there are so many incredible open datasets now. I hadn't thought about inverting the structure but it could work really well for that audience.