16th International Conference on Brain Informatics 2023
I was very excited to find out that my research submission to the 16th International Conference on Brain Informatics 2023 was accepted and I was given the opportunity to present my paper through an oral presentation as well as a poster presentation.
Brain Informatics Conference
The International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI) has established itself as the world’s premier research conference on Brain Informatics, which is an emerging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research field that combines the efforts of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to explore the main problems that lie in the interplay between human brain studies and informatics research.
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Click here to watch a video highlighting the history of the Brain Informatics Conference and giving an overview of this year's edition that was held at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ across the Hudson river from Manhattan, New York.
They said that this year's conference was attended by over 100 university faculty and over 50 Phd students and post doc researchers from over 25 countries. Click here to see the abstracts of all the papers presented.
Being in their midst, interacting with them and attending their keynotes, paper presentations and workshops was at the same time exhilarating and terrifying. Turns out, I was the only high school student who presented a paper there and one of only two who made a poster presentation.
Oral Presentation
My oral presentation was for 15 minutes followed by Q&A for 5 minutes. See below to review my presentation where I showcased my research and finding that single neuron firing rates can indeed predict the trail outcome of a Visual Working Memory Task in a primate.
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The audience were very supportive in listening to what I had to say and also asked me great questions. I also got ideas on hyperparameters that I can further tune to improve the accuracy of my predictions.
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Poster Presentation
Here is the poster I presented as part of the poster presentation at the conference.
Meeting Dr. Emery Brown
I had a chance to speak to the main keynote speaker, Dr. Emery Brown, a very eminent statistician, neuroscientist, and anesthesiologist from MIT and Harvard. His keynote speech on how general anesthesia impacts the brain and the neurophysiology of loss and recovery of consciousness was absolutely fascinating and very insightful. He was kind enough to provide clarifications to some of my questions and also gave me advice on how I can best prepare myself to become a neuroscience researcher. Listening to his talk and then interacting with him was definitely one of the highlights of this conference for me.
Meeting Dr. Amy Kuceyeski
I presented my work to another of the conference's keynote speakers, Dr. Amy Kuceyeski from Cornell, whose keynote talk was about the intersection between biological and artificial neural networks and how each is informing our knowledge about the other. She listened to me very patiently, gave me guidance on further work and also shared some insights from her own extensive work. She said that if I went to Cornell, I could work in her lab. She is sooo cool !!!
Meeting Dr. John Ngai
I was fortunate to be able to attend the keynote speech of Dr. John Ngai, Director of the National Institute of Health BRAIN Initiative. He gave a detailed talk about the tremendous amount of funding going into neuroscience research ($680 million in 2023) and the various initiatives being pursued in the USA and other countries including a project to map every neuron and synapse in the Human Brain. Mind blowing (pun intended)!!
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Made me even more excited about pursuing Neuroscience at college and beyond. With so much interest and funding going into Neuroscience, I think its future will be very interesting.