Neuroscience and AI with Basis co-founder Emily Mackevicius

Knowledge Distillation with Helen Byrne

Emily Mackevicius is a co-founder and director of Basis, a nonprofit applied research organization focused on understanding and building intelligence while advancing society’s ability to solve intractable problems.
Emily is a member of the Simons Society of Fellows, and a postdoc in the Aronov lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.
Her research uncovers how complex cognitive behaviors are generated by networks of neurons through local interactions and learning mechanisms.
Links to work mentioned in this episode:

• Basis, the research institute co-founded by Emily: basis.ai
• Emily's work with Fang et. al. relating brain computations to AI/ML algorithms: https://elifesciences.org/articles/80680
• Basis blog post about this work (Fang et. al.): https://www.basis.ai/blog/sr-fang2023/
• Stachenfeld et al. paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4650
• Emily's work with Michale Fee relating Reinforcement Learning algorithms to brain areas that birds use when they learn to sing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438817302349
• Emily's work with Aronov lab colleagues on how the hippocampus forms one-shot/episodic memory 'barcodes' in food-caching birds: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00235-6
• NPR story about this work: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1198909635/chickadee-bird-brain-memory-brain-pattern-food
• Github collab-creatures repo for the Basis collaborative intelligent systems project: https://github.com/BasisResearch/collab-creatures
• Basis's core open-source code repository for causal reasoning, ChiRho: https://basisresearch.github.io/chirho/getting_started.html
• Basis's city policy dashboard, polis: http://polis.basis.ai/