PhD Student, Trinity College Dublin
Will infant-inspired learning mechanisms lead to more intelligent computer vision models, in turn helping us to learn about the human brain?
About me
I’m a PhD student with Prof. Rhodri Cusack in Trinity College Dublin. I settled on a project in computational cognitive neuroscience after a more molecular-focused education in biology, chemistry and neuroscience (along with some training in the arts & humanities along the way). Now, I’m all about advancing the state of the art in neuroscience and AI.
Work
I’m really excited about the work being done at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. I work daily across the fields of infant development, computer vision and adult neuroimaging - I believe that by integrating across these disciplines we can access questions of learning and intelligence that have so far gone unanswered.
01
SemanticCMC
Inspired by infant learning, this self-supervised deep learning model develops more semantically meaningful representations by leveraging the temporal co-occurrences in a naturalistic movie dataset. This model was first presented during workshops at NeurIPS 2020 and CVPR 2021, and I continue to develop its growth. Check out my posters, papers and presentations here.
02
Infant Studies
My initial results were presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS 2020). This presentation will give you an idea of how deep learning models link into infant developmental science. I’m also presenting at BCCCD as part of a symposium on Infant and Machine Intelligence in interdisciplinary dialogue.
03
Machine Learning
Here’s a link to my GitHub repository of assignments and project work completed as part of a machine learning module taught by Trinity’s School of Computer Science and Statistics. I completed the module with a first class honours (72%). I’ve included my project in the repo, but I completed various different assignments on the principles of ML that I omitted for plagiarism reasons.
04
FOUNDCOG
I work extensively on Prof. Cusack’s ERC-funded Foundations of Cognition project. This ambitious project aims to recruit the largest ever cohort of infants for awake fMRI. I have been involved in every step of the process from ethical approval, idea generation, design, data collection and analyses which has taught me valuable lessons in what it takes to run a large-scale research project. As of December 2022 we’ve scanned over 100 2 month old infants, and analysis is progressing every day.
05
Science Communication
I love to engage in outreach and scientific communication and I welcome any opportunities to engage with the public or students to help demystify science. I am especially passionate about encouraging women into STEM, and I have seen the benefits of this through my own experience with Code First Girls and Bank of America. Most recently, I’ve organised an information evening for our FOUNDCOG parents, and spoke as part of Creative Brain Week - check that out here.
06
Writing
Here’s a few examples of my writing from various assignments I completed in my undergraduate.
My CV
I completed my undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin where I received a first class honours. My final year project (final grade 82%) was a crash course in deep neural networks and neuroimaging, which ignited my passion for the field.
In the interim year before starting my PhD, I worked as a research assistant and administrator in the Cusack Lab followed by an internship with Bank of America’s Global Technology team in Dublin. These positions allowed me to develop both my scientific and corporate professional skills.
Funding
I’m jointly funded by Prof. Cusack’s ERC Advanced Grant FOUNDCOG and the Irish Research Council (IRC).
I was awarded the IRC’s Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship for my project “Towards Machines That Learn to See Like Humans” to the value of €82,500. This competitive and prestigious award is an accolade that I’m proud to have achieved.
Other than science …
In addition to my scientific education, I’ve trained as an actor with the Gaiety School of Acting and The Lir (TCD/RADA). This experience makes me a comfortable and confident public speaker and communicator. I believe in the value of pursuing training in creative endeavours in order to progress as a well-rounded critical thinker and researcher.
I’ve recently become more interested by the work being done in Neurohumanities, and would love to explore this topic more in my own research.
