The 2024 UCL NeuroAI Annual Conference was held on Wednesday 17 July 2024 at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health drawing together machine learning and neuroscience researchers. The conference included talks by speakers from academia and industry, ranging from PhD students to professors, as well as poster sessions for researchers to display and discuss research.
Topics spanned the full scope of NeuroAI from Large Language Models to mouse behaviour and included keynote talks as well as quickfire lightning talks. The conference aimed to inspire attendees by demonstrating the potential of this field for future scientific advancements and novel applications.
Keynote Talks | ||
| Dr Rui Ponte Costa | University of Oxford | Back to the present: self-supervised learning in cortical layers |
| Dr Erin Grant | Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and Sainsbury Wellcome Centre | Nonlinear dynamics of localization in neural receptive fields |
| Dr Kevin Miller | Google DeepMind, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Sainsbury Wellcome Centre | Data-driven discovery of cognitive model |
| Dr Anthony Zador | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory | Brain wiring through the genomic bottleneck |
| Professor Maneesh Sahani | Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL | Neural circuits, distributional representations, and recognition-parametrised learning: principles for building models of the sensory world |
| Panel discussion | Dr Rui Ponte Costa, Dr Erin Grant, Dr Kevin Miller and Professor Maneesh Sahani |
Lightning Talks | ||
| Marco Abrate | PhD Student, Cell and Developmental Biology, UCL | An artificial neural network model of cognitive map development |
| Yang Chu | PhD Student, HiPEDS – EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training, Imperial College London | Bootstrapping the auditory space map via an innate circuit |
| Dr Kira Düsterwald | PhD Student, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL | Unsupervised ground metric learning with tree Wasserstein distance |
| Dr Marcus Ghosh | AI in Science Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Imperial College London | Non-feedforward architectures enable diverse multisensory computations |
| Zonglun Li | PhD Student, Mathematics, UCL | When reservoir computing meets information theory: the tendency of entropy change through spike timing-dependent plasticity |
| Gabriel Ocana Santero | PhD Student, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford | Understanding serotonin: gated Deep Neural Networks reveal a unified model across its role in learning, neurodevelopment and psychedelics |
| Dr Alice Plebe | Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, UCL | Autonomous vehicles inspired by human brain and cognition |
| Dilip Rajeswari | Co-founder and CTO, XYZ | Predicting sex using resting-state electroencephalogram and deep learningbased convolutional transformer |
| Dr Nathan Skene | UK Dementia Research Institute Group Leader, Lecturer and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Imperial College London | Predicting cell type-specific epigenomic profiles accounting for distal genetic effects |
| Dr Michał Wójcik | Research Scientist, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford | Learning dynamics in the PFC can be explained by an external controller |
| Weihao Xia | PhD Student, Department of Statistical Science, UCL | UMBRAE: Unified multimodal brain decoding |