xcorr: AI & neuro

There’s a lot of interesting statistics you can do by scraping websites, whether it’s reading tables from Wikipedia, grabbing and aggregating climate change tables from government websites, or quantifying the exponential growth of covid-19 articles on Medium. Many of these pages will have easy-to-use methods to download the data in a develop-friendly format, for example […]

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Reverse correlation is a tried-and-tested nonlinear systems identification method to understand biological neurons. The idea is to open the black box that is a biological neuron by using random stimuli to probe how the neuron responds. We present a series of random stimuli to a sensory neuron. By averaging those that generated a response, we […]

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So you’re beginning to use Python daily. Great! You might still have a critical set of Matlab scripts from back in the day that doesn’t have a neat equivalent in Python. How do you rewrite this code in Python without introducing many headaches? I’ve had to do this a handful of times and have developed […]

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I was surprised by the amount of positive response to my last article on transitioning away from Matlab. Many people are ready to switch – but they’re facing some significant challenges. One of the biggest things I’ve heard beginners say is that they are overwhelmed with the number of choices they have to make with […]

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In my last article, I talked about how I got a job in industry. I had been programming Python on and off for 10 years when I got my first non-academic job. Having proficiency in a language that people use outside of academia will improve your chances of getting a job in industry. Learning a […]

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I often get asked how I landed a job in industry after my postdoc. After my PhD at McGill, I started a postdoc at UCLA in July 2014. After about 6 months, like many a postdoc, I started to get worried about my financial security and academic job prospects. So I started exploring jobs outside […]

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