Ask Slashdot: DIY Computational Neuroscience? 90
An anonymous reader writes "Over the last couple years, I have taught myself the basic concepts behind Computational Neuroscience, mainly from the book by Abbott and Dayan. I am not currently affiliated with any academic Neuroscience program. I would like to take a DIY approach and work on some real world problems of Computational Neuroscience. My questions: (1) What are some interesting computational neuroscience simulation problems that an individual with a workstation class PC can work on? (2) Is it easy for a non-academic to get the required data? (3) I am familiar with (but not used extensively) simulators like Neuron, Genesis etc. Other than these and Matlab, what other software should I get? (4) Where online or offline, can I network with other DIY Computational Neuroscience enthusiasts? My own interest is in simulation of Epileptogenic neural networks, music cognition networks, and perhaps a bit more ambitiously, to create a simulation on which the various Models of Consciousness can be comparatively tested."
Check out NEST (Score:4, Informative)
Some answers (Score:4, Informative)
I research hard AI. In my view thinking through and tackling example problems is the best way to explore a topic. If you require your system to mirror our current understanding of neuroscience, then you're essentially researching the algorithms of the brain.
If you're specifically looking into epilepsy and related, consider checking out William Calvin's [williamcalvin.com] website. He's an experimental neuroscientist [wikipedia.org] from University of Washington, who wrote many books that explain the neurological foundations of the brain in readable form with good detail.
(1) What are some interesting computational neuroscience simulation problems
Pretty much anything AI falls under that category. Go over to Kaggle.com [slashdot.org] and check out some of their competitions, including their past competitions. Check out the Google AI lab [google.com] and see what they're doing, and check out recent publications [arxiv.org] to see what people are trying to solve. Ask yourself: Are humans better than the computer, and can it be done better?
Here's a video [youtube.com] of a system that uses neuron simulation (of a sort) to recognize hand-written digits. A hand-written digits dataset is in the UCI archive below.
(2) Is it easy for a non-academic to get the required data?
Generally, yes. UCI has a repository [uci.edu] of machine-learning datasets. The researchers supporting Kaggle [slashdot.org] competitions frequently release their data.
I've found that researchers are generally approachable, and will give away copies of their data (I have 4 datasets from researchers). As a personal anecdote, last week a researcher from this very forum sent me his dataset of Mars altitude images [wikipedia.org] - I'm trying to come up with an algorithm to recognize craters.
(3) I am familiar with (but not used extensively) simulators like Neuron, Genesis etc. Other than these and Matlab, what other software should I get?
In my view, pick a computer language that has a wide support network of libraries, and code things from scratch.Something like Perl or R. At some point you will want to break open the box and see what's actually happening inside, and familiarity with the system (having constructed it) is key. You will want to insert trace statements, print out intermediate results, and so on. Most of the pre-built systems don't have what you will ultimately want, and building simulation objects isn't terribly hard.
(4) Where online or offline, can I network with other DIY Computational Neuroscience enthusiasts?
Please let me know if you find any (by posting a response).
I've found that most AI enthusiasts are really "big data" enthusiasts, and most of them are all about business rather than AI. The IRC AI chatrooms [irc] are all but dead, and most of what is there are students asking for help with their homework. (Although to be fair, the lurkers there know everything about AI and can answer questions and make suggestions if you're stuck.)
The NEAI meetup [meetup.com] in Cambridge is mostly spectators - people who want to find out about AI or how to use AI ("how can I use AI to improve the performance of my financial company?"). I hear there's an AI meetup out on the West coast that's pretty good.
See if there's a meetup [meetup.com] in your area for something related, or start one and see if anyone shows up.
Systematicity, and Fodor & Pylyshyn (Score:5, Informative)