A Blog About Curious Things

Welcome to my site. I write about things that catch my curiosity or that I am passionate about. Currently I am a research associate at MIT working on autonomous vehicle research, specifically how humans and AI systems can interact. I suppose you could say the ‘cognitive science of self driving cars’. I am generally interested in all things about minds, brains, and computers.

Blog

Attractor Networks, (A bit of) Computational Neuroscience Part III

Posted on by Jack Terwilliger
attractor landscape

Brains are comprised of networks of neurons connected by synapses — of course, there is a lot more to it than that, but this captures some of the essence of the brain.  A nice property of networks of neurons is that they have greater computational properties than the neurons and synapses themselves. In this post, … Continue reading “Attractor Networks, (A bit of) Computational Neuroscience Part III”

Synapses, (A Bit of) Biological Neural Networks – Part II

Posted on by Jack Terwilliger
pyrimidal neurons

Synapses are the couplings between neurons, allowing signals to pass from one neuron to another. However, synapses are much more than mere relays: they play an important role in neural computation. The ongoing dramas of excitation and inhibition and of synaptic potentiation and depression give rise to your abilities to make decisions, learn, and remember. … Continue reading “Synapses, (A Bit of) Biological Neural Networks – Part II”

(A Bit of) Biological Neural Networks – Part I, Spiking Neurons

Posted on by Jack Terwilliger

Neurons are cells — small bodies of mostly water, ions, amino acids and proteins with remarkable electrochemical properties. They are the primary functional units of the brain. Our mental experiences — our perceptions, memories, and thoughts — are the result of the ebb and flow of salts across neural bi-lipid membranes and the synaptic transmissions … Continue reading “(A Bit of) Biological Neural Networks – Part I, Spiking Neurons”

Misc/Tools

Omnizoom: a tool for zooming into videos, images, and arbitrary DOM elements. I use this to build annotation tools on MTurk.

Trajectory-generator: a tool for generating stimuli in a turk experiment — it’s about non-verbal communication and reasoning about crossing the street. This tool helps gather data about the latter.