Our research aim is to uncover the computational and organizational mechanisms in the brain. For example, what function does feedback play in our brains, and how do our expectations influence our perceptions? We study these questions by modelling neural networks. Through computational experiments and mathematical analysis, we try to understand the neurological basis of perception, cognition, and behaviour.

The lab is in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, and affiliated with the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience.


Latest News

Jeremy wins a TA award!

Jeremy Zheng received one of 5 Teaching Assistant awards

09-23-2024
BEST PAPER Award at ICANN!

Our paper was honoured with a ENNS Best Paper award at the Interational Conference on Artificial Neural Networks

09-20-2024
We made the cover of Neural Computation

Our paper on spiking phasor VSAs is published in Neural Computation

09-06-2024
Introducing Nicholas, part-time researcher

Nicholas Jiang will be implementing spiking phasors in Nengo this fall

09-03-2024
William finishes his masters degree

Congratulations to William for completing his MMath degree

08-23-2024
Jeff's interview on X Spaces

Jeff spent 2 hours answering questions on X(Twitter) Spaces

07-04-2024
Welcome to the lab, Alicia

Alicia will be doing research with us for the summer.

05-06-2024
Papers accepted at Canada AI Conference

Come to the Canadian Conference on AI to see lab members present their research.

05-06-2024
Say hello to our new member, Bing

Bing started his PhD in Jan 2024.

01-08-2024
William joins our team

Say hi to William from Montreal.

08-25-2023
Paper accepted at ICONS 2023

Jeff and Russell will present a paper at ICONS 2023 in Santa Fe, NM.

06-30-2023
Paper accepted in Frontiers in Neuroscience

Conratulations to Nicole, Mike, Chris and Jeff on their Frontiers in Neuroscience paper.

06-25-2023
Jeff gives keynote lecture at Midnight Sun VSA Workshop

Jeff was invited to deliver a keynote presentation to the Midnight Sun VSA workshop in LuleƄ, Sweden.

06-16-2023
Interview on the Thought Process podcast

Listen to Jeff being interviewed on the new podcast, Thought Process.

06-16-2023
Jeff speaks to INRC

Jeff presented his recent work to the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community.

05-02-2023
Two papers accepted at ICCM

We will be giving two talks at the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling in Amsterdam in July 2023.

04-30-2023
Jeff's back!

Prof. Orchard is back from his sabbatical in Australia

02-02-2023
Welcome to Kathryn

Dr. Simone will be joining the lab as a postdoctoral researcher.

01-07-2023
Mallory Graduated

Congratulations to Mallory Snow who finished her MMath degree.

12-08-2022
Jeff is on sabbatical

Jeff will spend 6 months working with the ICNS at Western Sydney University in Australia

08-01-2022
Success in ICCM

Some of our work will be presented at the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling in July.

06-01-2022
CogSci Here We Come!

Students and postdocs in the lab will be presenting their work at the CogSci conference in July.

05-20-2022
Research internship at Huawei

Ehsan will be working at Huawei, doing research to increase developer productivity using AI.

05-11-2022
An internship at Apple

Michael Karras will be at Apple AI/ML this summer.

03-10-2022
Welcome to Zahra Sheikhbahaee

Zahra will be working on AI algorithms of altruism.

03-07-2022
Welcome to Sherman Siu

Sherman is working on how to use neural networks to help in video editing.

12-20-2021
Welcome to Prof. Shi-Yuan Han

Dr. Shi-Yuan Han is a visiting scholar from the University of Jinan, China, until Dec 2022

12-07-2021
Jeff on Unlabelled Unstructured podcast

'Unlabelled Unstructured' is a podcast by the UW Data Science Club.

10-26-2021
PyData Global: Lightning Talk on NLP xAI

Brian gave an industry-applied talk on Pointer Generator Networks for Legal Document Summarisation.

09-30-2021
Brian is Netflix Famous!

Brian took part in the Copper's Hill Cheese Rolling race, and a photo ended up on Netflix.

09-09-2021
Welcome new lab members

Say hello to some new faces joining our lab

08-31-2021
Award of Excellence: Mallory Snow

Mallory has been honoured with the MUN Grenfell Award of Excellence in both Computational Math and Physics

06-01-2021
Internship for Nolan

Nolan is doing a research internship at Huawei

05-06-2021
Alex is done!

Alex successfully completed his MMath degree.

04-23-2021
Say hi to Mallory

We welcome the Lab's newest graduate student

01-05-2021
Teaching a robot

Alex is using reinforcement learning to teach a robot to reach

01-04-2021
Speaking at NeuRIG

Jeff spoke about "Bridging between Computers and Cortex" to Lakehead University's Neuroscience Research Interest Group

11-27-2020
Writeup feature for CS home page

Nolan's work (recently published in PLOS ONE) was featured by the Cheriton School of CS. It also garnered a shout-out on ACM TechNews

10-26-2020
Neuroscience: A computational problem

Jeff was featured in an imprint article entitled Neuroscience: A computational problem.

09-29-2020
PLOS ONE Paper Published

Nolan Shaw, Tyler Jackson, and Jeff Orchard had their paper published in PLOS ONE

08-18-2020
Wei Sun Thesis

Congratulations to Wei Sun for finishing his Masters degree.

08-17-2020
Publication: Neural Computation

My master's student, Wei Sun, and I published our work in the journal Neural Computation.

08-16-2020
Accepted: IEEE Trans. Cognitive and Developmental Systems

Lin Wang and I have another paper accepted, this one in IEEE Trans. Cognitive and Developmental Systems

12-12-2019
NeurIPS Workshop Paper

We will be presenting a paper at the workshop Perception as Generative Reasoning

10-31-2019
Journal Paper Accepted

Our paper was accepted for publication in IEEE TSMC-Systems

09-29-2019
Journal Paper Accepted

Our paper on detecting water leaks using neural networks was accepted.

09-24-2019
Interviewed for 'Why Code?'

Interview about why coding is fun and important

12-05-2017
Best Paper Award at ICONIP

J Orchard, L Castricato, "Combatting Adversarial Inputs using a Predictive-Estimator Network", International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP), 7 pages, 2017.

11-02-2017
Debate: Is the mind a machine?

Jeff debated Matt Dickerson of Middlebury College.

09-28-2017