About Patrick Mineault

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]

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

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.

3 responses to “About Patrick Mineault”

  1. […] friend Patrick Mineault has been helping me with the book planning process, and the first thing he asked me to do is to […]

  2. […] Bolte, Nikolay Chenkov/Thomas McColgan, Thomas Deneux, Johannes Friedrich, Tim Machado, Patrick Mineault, Marius Pachitariu, Dario Ringach, Artur Speiser and their […]

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