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Neuroscience

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the field of theoretical neuroscience. I'm currently a member of the Equipe Audition, part of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, in the Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), France. I'm funded by Spikehear, a European Research Council grant.

Research Interests

I am interested in neural mechanisms underlying computations performed by the brain. In particular, I'm interested in understanding spike-timing based codes and computation. At the moment, I'm trying to understand how neural synchrony can be used to perform sound localisation (see below).

Projects

Brian

"Brian" is a software package for simulating spiking neural networks. Specifically, it is a package for the Python programming language providing functions and classes designed to make writing simulations of neural networks as easy and flexible as possible. See Brian's web page.

The most recent release of Brian added the model fitting toolbox for automatic fitting of spiking neuron models to electrophysiological recordings. For the next releases, we are focussing on a new library, Brian Hears, for auditory modelling, and on running Brian on GPU chips (inexpensive massively parallel processors available in consumer graphics cards).

Sound localisation

Sound localisation is the ability of many animals to determine to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy the direction from which a sound is coming. I am working on a neural model of this ability using synchrony, coincidence detection, and spike-timing dependent plasticity. The hope is that this will throw light on the computations performed by real brains (in particular, localisation not just in the horizontal plane), learning (in particular, to account for our ability to learn to localise sounds after a change in head or ear shape such as happens during development), and also provide effective new algorithms to localise sounds in the presence of distractors, noise, reverberations, etc.

Presentations and Posters

Publications


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