Adam H Marblestone
Email: adam.h.marblestone [at] gmail
Publications: google scholar
Patents: google patents
CV: PDF
Essays
Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience (NEURON)
"Sometimes there is a tension in biomedicine: do we pursue basic science for curiosity’s sake, or do we focus on translational work... One way to connect the two is to consider a third path: what if we could accelerate our understanding of the basic science, via new technology, so that we could reduce the risk of translational work, and magnify the impact of the latter?"
How to Study the Brain (The Chronicle Review)
"We can’t simply ask 'what does this bundle of neurons do'? We have to ask, how might the brain work in principle, what clues can we gather from psychology and behavior... To a theoretical physicist, theory might look like elegant mathematical equations that quantitatively predict the behavior of a system. To a computer scientist, theory might mean the construction of classes of algorithms that behave in ways similar to how the brain processes information. Cognitive scientists have theories of the brain that are formulated in other ways..."
Designing Tools for Assumption-Proof Brain Mapping (NEURON)
"The timing is right to elucidate design principles for neuro-technologies that work backward from the fundamental properties of the brain and are equal to the challenge of mapping their mechanisms, rather than working forward from known technology building blocks..."
Selected Talks / Lectures
Fiber optic reflectometry neural recording (Glasgow, 2017): slides
Designing scalable biological interfaces (Harvard, 2014): slides
Stanford cs379c discussion: dense labeling with combinatorial codes (Stanford, 2015): slides, course notes
Stanford cs379c discussion: molecular ticker tapes (Google, 2013): slides, audio, course notes
billion year old information technologies (TEDxBeaconStreet, 2012): video, TEDx blog, follow-up post
programming matter (Harvard, 2012): video
from quantum noise to heat (Yale, 2008): PDF
quantum entanglement, bell's theorem and reality in 12 minutes (Yale, 2006): PDF
Other talks and lectures I found interesting:
- Boyden on engineering scientific revolutions
- Church on bioengineering
- Pareto-Topian goal-alignment
- Zador on sequencing the connectome
- Douglas on DNA machines
- Deutsch on our place in the cosmos
- Wayne on integrated AI cognitive architectures
- Marder on robust biological neural circuits
- O'Reilly on goal-driven cognition
- Richards on deep learning in the brain
- LeCun on how does the brain learn so much so quickly
- Aguera y Arcas on Social intelligence
- Kalil on innovating in government
- Blumberg on the learning involved in innateness
- Campisi on cellular senescence
- Fiete on navigation in the brain
- Feynman lectures
- Marcus / LeCun debate and Marcus / Bengio debate
- Minsky interviews
- How to grow almost anything lectures
- Sebastian Seung on connectomics of cortical learning rules
- Hinton on dynamic routing with capsules
- Denk on connectomics
- Jain on connectomics
- Caldeira on geonengineering
- Jeevanjee on climate physics
- Andrew Lo on biomedical megafunds
- Jepsen on seeing inside the body
- Wang on seeing inside the body
- Dyson's heretical thoughts on science and society
- Griffiths on climate
- Sapolsky on biology of humans at our best and worst
- Weyl on radical markets
- Musk on SpaceX Mars plan
- Handmer on industrializing Mars
- Gates on energy investments
- Moore's law is not dead
- Tenenbaum on human cognition
- Bengio on a path to artificial general intelligence
- Clune on AI generating algorithms
- Lazaro-Gredilla on recursive cortical network
- Molecular additive manufacturing
- MIT pathway to fusion energy
- Arati Prabhakar on an ARPA for social problems
- Michael Levin on bioelectrical computation in development
- Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
- Chu on energy tech
Some of the many papers that have influenced me over the years and/or that just blow my mind:
- Energy-Efficient Abundant-Data Computing: The N3XT 1000×
- Deep learning without weight transport
- Perirhinal input to neocortical layer 1 controls learning
- The cortex as a graphical model, and Intrinsic Gradient Networks
- Reversal of ageing- and injury-induced vision loss by Tet-dependent epigenetic reprogramming
- Niche stiffness underlies the ageing of central nervous system progenitor cells
- Dendritic error backpropagation in deep cortical microcircuits
- A neural network trained to predict future video frames mimics critical properties of biological neuronal responses and perception
- Recurrent Independent Mechanisms
- Label-Free Supervision of Neural Networks with Physics and Domain Knowledge
- Building fast Bayesian computing machines out of intentionally stochastic, digital parts
- Neural Turing Machines
- Efficient probabilistic inference in generic neural networks trained with non-probabilistic feedback
- Random synaptic feedback weights support error backpropagation for deep learning
- DRAW: A Recurrent Neural Network For Image Generation
- Statistical computations underlying the dynamics of memory updating
- Unsupervised Predictive Memory in a Goal-Directed Agent
- Prefrontal cortex as a meta-reinforcement learning system
- From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts
- Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People
- Prioritized memory access explains planning and hippocampal replay
- The challenge of understanding the brain: where we stand in 2015
- Cognitive consilience: primate non-primary neuroanatomical circuits underlying cognition
- Dynamically partitionable autoassociative networks as a solution to the neural binding problem
- A hypothesis for basal ganglia-dependent reinforcement learning in the songbird
- Recall of memory sequences by interaction of the dentate and CA3: a revised model of the phase precession
- Beyond the connectome: how neuromodulators shape neural circuits
- A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain
- Towards a Mathematical Theory of Cortical Micro-circuits
- The Hallmarks of Aging
- Dissolving the Fermi paradox
- Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system
- Expansion Microscopy
- A homing CRISPR mouse resource for barcoding and lineage tracing
- Correlations in ion channel expression emerge from homeostatic tuning rules
- Deep-tissue focal fluorescence imaging with digitally time-reversed ultrasound-encoded light
- Single-Pixel Imaging via Compressive Sampling
- In situ localized amplification and contact replication of many individual DNA molecules
- Sequencing the Connectome
- The physics of climate change: simple models in climate science
- Faradaic electro-swing reactive adsorption for CO2 capture
- Global warming and ice ages: I. prospects for physics-based modulation of global change
- Millisecond-timescale, genetically targeted optical control of neural activity
- Noninvasive electron microscopy with interaction-free quantum measurements
- Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities
- Replication origin of bacteriophage f1. Two signals required for its function
- Kinetic Proofreading: A New Mechanism for Reducing Errors in Biosynthetic Processes Requiring High Specificity
- Towards synthesis of a minimal cell
- Protein sectors: evolutionary units of three-dimensional structure
- Induction of pluripotent stem cells from mouse embryonic and adult fibroblast cultures by defined factors
- Sub-diffraction-limit imaging by stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy
- An information-bearing seed for nucleating algorithmic self-assembly
- Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation
- Programming biomolecular self-assembly pathways
- Folding DNA into nanoscale shapes and patterns
- Quantum network theory
- Quantizing the damped harmonic oscillator
- Quantum Pseudo-Telepathy
- Quantum mysteries revisited
- See also: Ben Reinhardt's seminal paper club
A few of many technical and semi-technical books that have influenced me over the years:
- Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms
- How To Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition
- Sparse Distributed Memory
- Reframing Super-Intelligence: Comprehensive AI services as general intelligence
- The Physics of Information Technology
- Biological Physics: Entropy, Information, Life
- The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
- Inadequate Equilibria
- Quantum Information and Quantum Computation
- The Computational Beauty of Nature
- Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity
- Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity
- The Feynman Lectures on Computation
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics
- Godel’s Proof
- Godel Escher Bach
- A New Kind Of Science
- The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind
- How the Mind Works
- The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul
- The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
- Thinking in Java
- The Selfish Gene
- Engines of Creation
- The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics
- Calculus Made Easy
- What is Mathematics?
Some other interesting stuff online: