I’m currently located in Iceland and work as a data scientist for Íslandsbanki.
I did a PhD in computer science at ETHZ in Switzerland in the group of Prof. Angelika Steger.
My thesis work is in the field of computational neuroscience. The brain can be thought of as a massively parallel machine. There are multiple hypothesis of how the brain computes. Many of them are hard to test experimentally and the data we already have is insufficient to make good predictions.
With difficulty obtaining data it thus becomes interesting to study models and emergent behaviour. Saying that my work is about understanding the brain is a huge overstatement though. There is so little we currently understand.
An easier and more concrete starting point is to study questions such as:
As an example one of the holy grails of such research is to find the so called canonical microcircuit. This circuit is believed to be the computational substrate of the brain. It is conjectured to be quite small, perhaps in the order of 100.000 neurons or less. No one has so far managed to identify it or describe it. It forms the basis of the columnar organisational hypothesis, that our brain is made by stacking such circuits in parallel.
From my point of view it is thus interesting to study what properties we need to build such a circuit starting from the most basic building blocks. I plan to write a couple of blog posts about my work in this direction. It is extremely far from producing anything resembling a canonical microcircuit but it might yield some insight into what we can achieve with only simple components and simple rules to connect them.