Looking for research directions (Just started an HTM internship at Berkeley Labs)

  • I incorporated a model of grid cells into the spatial pooler. The resulting model can also produce “object-cells” that respond an object regardless of which part of the object its looking at.
    Video Lecture of Kropff & Treves, 2008

  • I found and showed how to fix a bug in the spatial pooler algorithm: it does not control the total number of presynapses that a cell can have. Consequently some cells will form a presynapse with every available input, and some cells will form no synapses at all.
    Synapse Competition

  • An area of active research is attention/conscious access. I think that high-frequency bursts of APs are a special signal that indicates that the animal should pay extra attention to the information being transmitted. The apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons are tuned to respond to burst-firing and can cause their cell to emit burst-firing.
    Evidence for this theory: L5tt cells are attentional (paper summaries)
    A proof-of-concept model: A Model of Apical Dendrites

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