Citizen Science: How might we reverse engineer a brain?

Computers will one day match our own mental agility; learning, navigating and performing complex interactions all on scant power. But getting to that point will require neuroscientists and engineers to reverse engineer our least understood organ—the brain.

In this talk, third-year neuroscience PhD student at Stanford Tyler Benster will describe his dreams, theory, and many failures towards reverse engineering a larval zebrafish brain using machine learning. The discussion will include an overview of cutting-edge methods for whole-brain imaging and stimulation that are ushering in a new era for systems neuroscience, as well as a brief overview of modern AI techniques as applied to neuroscience.

Thursday • November 7th6:30 pm - 8:00 pm Downtown Library • 224 Church St.

Tyler Benster is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford. He also works as a General Partner at Asimov Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on Frontier Technology.

Citizen Science is a collaboration between the Santa Cruz Public Libraries; the Santa Cruz Children's Museum of Discovery (SCCMOD), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

We invite you to join us every first Thursday of the month for a presentation and Q&A with local experts and researchers in the field discussing life science, ecology, geology, genetics, climatology and more. Let’s connect, inspire and inform each other!

For more information contact [email protected] • 831-427-7717