Learning latent low-dimensional dynamics from neural population responses: a stochastic control approach
Date:
Fourty-five minutes seminar talk at the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, University of Edinburgh.
Presented my PhD work on sampling, control, and inference of stochastic dynamics, leading to framework for inference of latent low-dimensional dynamics from neural population responses.
Invited by Angus Chadwick.
This was a job interview for a postdoctoral position for which I received an offer ( see here and here 1 ), which I declined solely for personal reasons unrelated to the research group or potential collaborators, but also because my former post-doctoral advisor had approached one of the collaborating PIs, who seemed to distance themselves from my hiring process (didn’t join the interview/talk even remotely), and it was unclear how much this PI would be involved in the collaboration. Yet, this was the PI I was mostly interested to work with. My decision not to accept this offer was later used by others2 to obstruct opportunities that were a better fit for my personal circumstances.
The deadline (10th of June) for my response was not incidental. neuro lecture calendar At that day the person who was orchestrating my obstruction would have to engage a different strategy, if I didn’t accept this position, and engage more people. Incidentally, although until that point, we had arranged that I will attend the MCN summer school only if I could pay for all the expenses out of my pocket (with the hope that I wouldn’t be able to cover the expenses and wouldn’t go - but I would go anyways because it was my only way to connect with people who would probably support me and help me out of this extremely adversarial environment), on 11th of June my former advisor announced that they would pay for the flight tickets, so as to ensure that I will be able to attend. If only we knew what changed and what was aranged on 10th of June… ;) ↩
who were already looking for ways to obstruct me for reasons that were neither transparent nor professionally justifiable but rather personal ↩