I’m an AI researcher and neurotechnologist. I do freelance AI consulting through xcorr consulting. I’m always happy to take on new, manifestly important projects that are nearly impossible. My email is patrick.mineault@gmail.com.

I’m interested in the intersection of AI and neuro, a field called neuroAI. By studying how the brain works, we can learn principles that allow us to make better AI. By creating good models of the brain, we can find new ways of affecting behaviour, both to enhance the well and help those with neurological disorders. I wrote an article about this idea for the venture capital firm a16z (Andreessen Horowitz).

I did a PhD a visual neuroscience at McGill with Dr. Chris Pack and a postdoc at UCLA with Dr. Dario Ringach. I studied how the brain creates meaningful visual representations which can drive behaviour. I worked at Google, studying at how people view and interact with webpages. I was also a Brain Computer Interface engineer at Facebook Reality Labs, building a BCI that allows you to type with your brain.

I took a sabbatical to help build the first edition of Neuromatch Academy as CTO. It’s an online summer school in computational neuroscience and AI. The first edition brought together 191 TAs and 1700 students from 60 countries learning full-time for 3 weeks. I co-founded a startup, Blindsight Therapeutics, where I was CTO and built the IP portfolio. Our aim was to help people with cortical blindness through advances in neuroAI.

My modus operandi is take ideas from distant fields and collide them to advance our understanding. Hence the name xcorr: cross correlation. I write about some of these collisions on my long-running blog.

Work

2022 – Freelance AI consultant, xcorr consulting, Montreal

Bringing neuroAI advances to industry; design, data science & programming

2020-2022 – CTO and co-founder, Blindsight Therapeutics, Montreal

Building a treatment for people suffering with cortical blindness, inspired by advances in neuro AI.

2017-2019 – Brain Computer Interface Engineer, Facebook, Menlo Park

Building a brain-computer interface that will allow people to type with their thought. Some press coverage: [1] [2] [3]

2015-2017 – Software Engineer and data scientist, Google, Mountain View

Helping organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Ran some of the largest psychophysics study ever.

2014-2015 – Postdoctoral researcher at the Dario Ringach lab, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA.

Studied representation in the visual cortex of mice, looking at how stimuli are differentially encoded during locomotion.

2008-2014 – Doctoral researcher at the Pack Lab, McGill University, Montreal.

I studied visual representation and decision making at the level of single neurons, populations of neurons, and psychophysical observers [PhD thesis].

Education

• PhD (2014), Integrated Program in Neuroscience, McGill University. Thesis: Parametric modeling of visual cortex at multiple scales. [PDF]
• B.Sc., Physics and Mathematics (2007). McGill University

Papers

[Always up to date list on Google Scholar]

• PJ Mineault, S Bhaktiari, BA Richards, CC Pack (2021) Your head is there to move you around: Goal-driven models of the primate dorsal pathway. NeurIPS 2021. Selected as spotlight (<3% of submissions).
• S Bhaktiari, PJ Mineault, T Lillicrap, CC Pack, BA Richards (2021) The functional specialization of visual cortex emerges from training parallel pathways with self-supervised predictive learning. NeurIPS 2021. Selected as spotlight (<3% of submissions).
• The Neuromatch Academy Authors (with 131 co-authors). (2021) Neuromatch Academy: a 3-week, online summer school in computational neuroscience. Journal of Open Source Education.
• T van Viegen, A Akrami, K Bonnen, E DeWitt, A Hyafil, H Ledmyr, GW Lindsay, PJ Mineault, JD Murray, X Pitkow, A Puce, M Sedigh-Sarvestani, C Stringer, T Achakulvisut, E Alikarami, M Selim Atay, E Batty, JC Erlich, BV Galbraith, Y Guo, AL Juavinett, MR Krause, S Li, M Pachitariu, BE Straley, D Valeriani, E Vaughan, M Vaziri-Pashkam, ML Waskom, G Blohm, K Kording, P Schrater, B Wyble, S Escola, MAK Peters (2021). Neuromatch Academy: Teaching Computational Neuroscience with global accessibility. Trends in Cognitive Science (TiCS).
• T Achakulvisut, T Ruangrong, PJ Mineault, TP Vogels, MAK Peters, P Poirazi, C Rozell, B Wyble, DFM Goodman, KP Kording (2021). Towards democratizing and automating online conferences: lessons from the Neuromatch Conferences. Trends in Cognitive Sciences (TiCS).
• P Berens, J Freeman, T Deneux, N Chenkov, T McColgan, A Speiser, JH Macke, SC Turaga, PJ Mineault, P Rupprecht, S Gerhard, RW Friedrich, J Friedrich, L Paninski, M Pachitariu, KD Harris, B Bolte, TA Machado, DL Ringach, J Stone, LE Rogerson, NJ Sofroniew, J Reimer, E Froudarakis, T Euler, MR Rosón, L Theis, AS Tolias, M Bethge (2018). Community-based benchmarking improves spike rate inference from two-photon calcium imaging data. PLoS computational biology 14 (5), e1006157
• M Masis, PJ Mineault, E Phan, SC Lin (2018). The role of phacoemulsification in glaucoma therapy: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Survey of ophthalmology 63 (5), 700-710
• PJ Mineault, E Tring, JT Trachtenberg, DL Ringach (2016). Enhanced Spatial Resolution During Locomotion and Heightened Attention in Mouse Primary Visual Cortex. J Neurosci. 36(24):6382– 6392. [PDF]
• DL Ringach, PJ Mineault, E Tring, N Olivas, J Trachtenberg, P Garcia-Junco Clemente (2016).Spatial clustering of tuning in mouse primary visual cortex. Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12270 [HTML]
• T. P. Zanos, P. J. Mineault, D. Guitton and C.C. Pack (2016). Mechanisms of Saccadic Suppression in Primate Cortical Area V4. J. Neurosci. 36 (35) 9227-9239; [PDF]
• T.P. Zanos, P.J. Mineault, K.T. Nasiotis, D. Guitton, C.C. Pack (2015). A Sensorimotor Role for Traveling Waves in Primate Visual Cortex. Neuron. 85:3, pp615–627. [PDF]
• P.J. Mineault, C.C. Pack (2013). The Cerebral Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Neuron [preview]. 79:5 pp. 833-855. [PDF]
• P.J. Mineault, T.P. Zanos, C.C. Pack (2013). Local field potentials reflect multiple spatial scales in V4. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 7:21. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2013.00021. [HTML]
• P.J. Mineault, F.A. Khawaja, D.A. Butts, C.C. Pack (2012). Hierarchical processing of complex motion in dorsal visual pathway.  PNAS, 109(16):E972-80. [PDF]
• Zanos, T.P., Mineault, P.J., and Pack, C.C.  (2011)  Removal of spurious correlations between spikes and local field potentials.  Journal of Neurophysiology, 105, 474-486. [PDF]
• Mineault, P.J., Barthelmé, S., and Pack, C.C.  (2009)  Improved classification images with sparse priors in a smooth basis.  Journal of Vision, 9(10):17, 1-24. [PDF]

Patents

• Mineault, P.J. Neural decoding with co-learning for brain computer interfaces. US11314329B1. Assigned to Meta Platforms Inc.
• Chevillet, M.A., Mineault, P.J., Mugler, E.M., Jennings S.Y.K. Wearable brain computer interface. US11301044B1. Assigned to Meta Platforms Inc.
• Chevillet, M.A., Dugan, R.E., Jennings S.Y.K., Choma M.A., Tiecke T.G., Mineault, P.J., Mugler, E.M., Wettersten, H. Brain computer interface for text predictions. US10795440B1. Assigned to Meta Platforms Inc.

Speaking experience

• Guest speaker, The Data Scientist show with Daliana Liu
• Guest speaker, Yannic Kilcher‘s machine learning YouTube channel
• Guest speaker, Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra
• Guest lecturer, Harvard PhD Program in Neuroscience (2021) –  Structuring code and data workshop

Elsewhere on the web

Twitter: @patrickmineault
LinkedIn
Neurotree
Github

About this blog

I have been writing about neuroscience, AI, programming and data science on this blog since 2008.

Licensing

All of the code snippets on this blog are authored by me – unless otherwise indicated – and are licensed under an MIT license, which means you can use them without asking me about it. All the text is CC-BY-2.0, which means you can include it in a textbook, a paper, or repost it elsewhere and potentially modify without asking permission as long as you maintain an attribution line.