Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 1

Sept 7: My first week of graduate school at UCSD has been intense, and the fall term hasn't even started yet. I am participating in a program called Boot Camp – two weeks of intensive research mentorship and training funded by the National Science Foundation. The topic of the boot camp is Computer Vision and Learning. I am focusing on the human-learning part, and gaining valuable experience at computer modeling and neuroscience methods along the way. For our group project we are going to apply a machine learning algorithm to data from functional MRI brain scans. It's a technique called multi-voxel pattern analysis, which basically applies a linear classifier to data from brain images to see if we can predict (actually 'postdict') what the brain was doing at some point in time. The basic idea is to look for distributed networks (as opposed to loci) of brain activity that work together during basic memory/attention/perception processes.