Student Imbizo Summer School 2022
Published:
In August 2022 I attended the IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience (Imbizo) summer school. This was a teaching program aimed at diversifying the neuroscience community by inviting African and International students to study together at a school in Noorhoek, South Africa. This has been a truly inspirational experience. I have been exposed to so many different cultures and heard so many different journeys in research. From this I have recognised the privilege European scientists have regarding facilities, funding and accessibility.
The course was formed of four themes: biophysics and plasticity; mechanistic models of NN and learning; motor control and decision-making; and Machine learning. From the four themes, the subjects that interested most were generalized linear models, piece-wise linear dynamical systems, graphical models and sparse coding. During the course I did two project, my mini-project was decoding behavior from latent low-dimensional space of neuronal data. My main project was building a generalized linear model (GLM) recurrent linear-nonlinear Poisson model from scratch, then fit the model to generated spike data displaying different behaviors. Code is here.