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Building Neuromatch Academy
Neuromatch Academy 2020 is a three-week online summer school in computational neuroscience that took place in July of 2020. We created interactive notebooks covering all aspects of computational neuroscience – from signals and models of spikes to machine learning and behaviour. We hired close to 200 TAs to teach this material to 1,700 students from…
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Scraping webpages with developer tools and Selenium
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: linearizing black-box functions
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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Rewriting Matlab code in Python
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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Orienting yourself through Python
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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Transitioning away from Matlab
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…
xcorr: AI & neuro 