Dan GoodmanSep 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

Show threadCian O’DonnellSep 1, 2023

@neuralreckoning @neuromatch having taught a Computational neuroscience course to CS undergrads, my view is that they can learn a lot just by comparing how brains compute vs human-made machine. So I think 1-2 lectures on "brains vs computers" could be quite horizon-expanding for them.

Eg brains don't use von-Neumann architecture, use spikes, analog computing, etc. even DNNs don't capture a lot of brain compute mechanisms, etc.

Show threadDan GoodmanSep 1, 2023
@cian @neuromatch yes, I like that! Only thing is that we don't know how brains compute and I don't want to pollute their minds too much with our current (almost surely wrong) ideas of how it works. But I think there's plenty that can be done along the lines you're suggesting despite that!
Show threadCian O’Donnell
@neuralreckoning @neuromatch haha fair enough. Nevertheless if it's just an example of "another type of computer" then it's not too much harm if ideas are ultimately wrong.
Sep 1, 2023 at 1:34pmWeb