Sander Bohte
Researcher
NeuroInformatics group
Life Sciences Cluster
CWI Amsterdam
Email: S.M.Bohte [at] cwi [dot] nl
Phone: tel. (+31) (0)20 592 4074
Fax: tel (+31) (0)20 592 4199
Mailing Address:
Life Sciences
CWI
Science Park 123
NL-1098XG Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Research overview
- I develop computational models to help understand the mechanisms that underly information processing in networks of - mainly - spiking neurons. I have particularly focused on encoding information with timed spikes, supervised neural learning, and general reinforcement learning methods.
- Very recently, we suggested a straightforward neural spike coding and decoding framework, where we observe that a spiketrain can be the fractional derivative of a signal. We believe this is both a simple and elegant neural coding paradigm, that can account for a number of experimental observations.
- With Pieter Roelfsema and Arjen van Ooyen, we are working on biologically plausible policy gradient reinforcement learning in spiking neurons. Elaborating on the AGREL idea, the research is yielding some surprising results on the (in)sufficiency of standard policy-gradient reinforcement learning.
- Other machine learning efforts have focused on distributed learning paradigms, with such applications as hospital patient scheduling and energy distribution in smart grids.
Master's students
Motivated Master's students who want to do their graduation thesis work with me, feel free to contact me. For subjects, see for instance the open projects, or you can propose your own favorite thing, related to general neural modeling research. Keep in mind that I do not have separate funding for MSc projects.
