Jan Gosmann
PhD candidate
I am a PhD student in Systems Design Engineering at the CNRG. My thesis will be on an integrated model of context, short-term, and long-term memory. Based on existing models a wider variety of behavioural and neural data will be matched. Besides memory, I did some mathematical work on high-dimensional representation in the Neural Engineering Framework.
Education
I completed my Master's degree in Computational Neuroscience at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Germany in 2013. The topic of my thesis was Gaussian Processes for Plume Distribution Estimation with UAVs.
Beforehand, I obtained a Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Computer Science from Bielefeld University, Germany. There my thesis project was the development of A Spatial Sound-based BCI for Robot Navigation.
Research interests
Though I am interested in a variety of topics from computer science, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, one of my main interests is how higher cognitive functions and general intelligence are realized in the brain and can be reproduced on a computer. Besides the question what the defining features of general intelligence are, this poses also the question how to implement a system adaptable to a variety of tasks.
A related interest of mine is how symbolic processing and connectionism can be unified in a meaningful way. I believe this to be a fundamental aspect to implement “intelligent” systems.
Publications
Theses
- (2018) An Integrated Model of Context, Short-Term, and Long-Term Memory. PhD thesis, University of Waterloo. Abstract PDF External link
Journal Articles
- (2021) CUE: A unified spiking neuron model of short-term and long-term memory. Psychological Review, 128(1):104-124. Abstract PDF DOI External link
- (2019) Vector-Derived Transformation Binding: An Improved Binding Operation for Deep Symbol-Like Processing in Neural Networks. Neural Computation, 31(5):849-869. Abstract PDF DOI External link
- (2017) A Spiking Neuron Model of Word Associations for the Remote Associates Test. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:99. Abstract DOI External link
- (2017) Automatic Optimization of the Computation Graph in the Nengo Neural Network Simulator. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 11:33. Abstract DOI External link
- (2016) Optimizing Semantic Pointer Representations for Symbol-Like Processing in Spiking Neural Networks. PLoS ONE, 11(2):1-18. Abstract DOI
Conference and Workshop Papers
- (2017) A Spiking Independent Accumulator Model for Winner-Take-All Computation. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. London, UK. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF Poster External link
- (2017) A Biologically Constrained Model of Semantic Memory Search. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. London, UK. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF External link
- (2016) Towards a Cognitively Realistic Representation of Word Associations. In 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2183–2188. Austin, TX. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF
- (2015) Spaun: A biologically realistic large-scale functional brain model. In Ontario and Canada Research Chairs Symposium. Council of Ontario Universities. Abstract PDF
- (2015) A Spiking Neural Model of the n-Back Task. In 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 812–817. Abstract PDF
Technical Reports and Preprints
- (2017) Efficiently sampling vectors and coordinates from the n-sphere and n-ball. Technical Report, Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, Waterloo, ON. Abstract PDF DOI External link
- (2016) BioSpaun: A large-scale behaving brain model with complex neurons. ArXiv. Abstract PDF
- (2015) Precise Multiplications with the NEF. Technical Report, Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, Waterloo, ON. Abstract PDF