I joined the CRNG lab in September 2019 as a PhD student in Computer Science and was co-supervised by Jeff Orchard from the Neurocognitive Computing Lab. The focus of my thesis was modelling spatial cognition in the brain with neurosymbolic methods. I hypothesized that particular neurosymbolic methods -- namely, Holographic Reduced Representations (Plate, 1995) extended to include dynamics -- were a good model of spatial encoding in the medial entorhinal cortex. These representations can be used to model grids cells, path integration, cognitive mapping, and SLAM. I additionally studied biologically-plausible reinforcement learning and successor representations.
I obtained a M.Math in the computational mathematics program at the University of Waterloo, where I researched continuous optimization and was advised by Thomas Coleman. I obtained my B.Sc. in mathematics and physics from McMaster University.
Publications
Journal Articles
- (2023) Biologically-Based Computation: How Neural Details and Dynamics Are Suited for Implementing a Variety of Algorithms. Brain Sciences, 13(2):245. Abstract PDF DOI External link
- (2023) Exploiting semantic information in a spiking neural SLAM system. Frontiers in Neuroscience. Abstract PDF DOI External link
- (2021) Simulating and Predicting Dynamical Systems With Spatial Semantic Pointers. Neural Computation, 33(8):2033-2067. Abstract PDF DOI
Conference and Workshop Papers
- (2024) Biologically-plausible Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling from Vector Symbolic Algebra-encoded Distributions. In ICANN. Abstract PDF
- (2023) Improving Reinforcement Learning with Biologically Motivated Continuous State Representations. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling. Abstract PDF
- (2022) A model of path integration that connects neural and symbolic representation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, volume 44. Toronto, ON. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF
- (2020) Accurate representation for spatial cognition using grid cells. In 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2367–2373. Toronto, ON. Cognitive Science Society. Abstract PDF