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Santiago Cadena

PhD Candidate. Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning @Bethgelab

University of Tübingen

IMPRS-IS Tübingen

I study visual processing in the brain by building predictive models of population responses from the macaque and rodent brains to image and video sequences. I use techniques from machine learning and computer vision to improve our predictive models and gain insights into the nonlinear computations of visual neurons. My goal is to understand the functional organization of the visual cortex and to use these insights to enhance current computer vision methods.

I am an IMPRS-IS PhD student at the lab of Matthias Bethge at the University of Tübingen, jointly supervised by Alexander Ecker at the University of Göttingen. During my PhD I’ve done multiple research visits to Andreas Tolias ‘s lab at Baylor College of Medicine to conduct electrophysiological recordings from awake macaques.

Interests

  • Neural system identification
  • Vision neuroscience
  • Neural data analysis
  • Computational neuroscience
  • Transfer learning
  • Deep learning
  • Natural image statistics
  • Interpretability of deep neural networks
  • Computational biology

Education

  • PhD Candidate in Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning, from 2017

    International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen

  • MSc in Neural Information Processing, 2014 - 2016

    University of Tübingen. Germany

  • BSc in Biomedical Engineering, 2010 - 2014

    Universidad de los Andes. Bogotá, Colombia

  • BSc in Electrical Engineering, 2009 - 2013

    Universidad de los Andes. Bogotá, Colombia

News

  • [17th Feb 2020] I am co-organizing the Neuroscience and ML workshop at the 1st Tübingen Robust Learning Symposium . I will also give a talk about Deep Learning models of the rodent and primate visual systems.

  • [27th Jan 2020] I will be visiting the new lab of Alexander Ecker at the University of Göttingen for the next week

  • [14th Dec 2019] I’m giving a talk at the Neuro-AI workshop at NeurIPS 2020 . I’ll present our recent paper modeling the mouse visual cortex.

  • [20th Dec 2019] Our paper lead by Ivan Ustyuzhaninov was accepted for a talk at ICLR 2020 in Ethiopia next year.

  • [7th Oct 2019] I’m attending the IMPRS-IS annual bootcamp. Looking forward to great talks and discussions with fellow scholars. I’m also presenting our recent work modeling the mouse visual cortex

  • [1st Oct 2019] Our paper was accepted for a talk at the Real Neurons vs. Hidden Units NuerIPS workshop in Vancouver, Canada.

  • [13th Sep 2019] Max Günthner will be giving a presentation of our submission on Learning divisive normalization at the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience ( CCN ) in Berlin

  • [2nd Sep 2019] I’m taking part at the 12th Advanced Scientific Python Summer School by the G-Node and the University of Camerino in Camerino, Italy

  • [16th Apr 2019] Once again, I’m participating as Teaching Assistant in the graduate course of Neural Data Analysis taught by Philipp Berens and Alexander Ecker at the University of Tübingen. This time I’ll be also giving two of the main lectures: Spike Sorting and Neural System Identification with ConvNets

  • [28th Feb 2019] I’m attending the Conference on Computational and Systems Neuroscience ( Cosyne ). We’ll be presenting a poster with Max Günthner about our recent work on learning end-to-end divisive normalization

  • [28th Jan 2019] I’m attending the IARPA site visit in Houston, TX at Baylor College of Medicine related to the MICrONS project. Looking forward to meet our collaborators from the from the NINAI team. I’ll spend the following week in Houston.

  • [8th Sep 2018] I’ll be at the European Conference on Computer Vision ( ECCV ) in Munich, Germany. I’ll present a poster about our work on diverse feature visualizations of CNN hidden units.

  • [25th Jun 2018] I’m participating at the Data Science Summer School (DS3) at École Polytechnique in Paris, France. I’m additionally presenting a poster about our recent diverse feature visualizations

  • [Apr 2018] I’ll be again a Teaching Assistant in the graduate course of Neural Data Analysis taught by Philipp Berens and Alexander Ecker at the University of Tübingen. I’ll be also giving one of the main lectures: Neural System Identification with ConvNets

  • [12th Apr 2018] I’m attending the CRC 1233 in Robust Vision retreat in Reutlingen, Germany.

  • [19th Mar 2018] I’m attending the IARPA site visit in Houston, TX at Baylor College of Medicine related to the MICrONS project. Looking forward to meet our collaborators from the from the NINAI team.

  • [16th Mar 2018] I’m goin to the Canonical Computation in Brains and Machines 2018 Symposium in New York.

  • [Nov 2017] I’m visiting the lab Andreas Tolias at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX for four months to conduct electrophysiological recordings from the macaque visual cortex

  • [1st Aug 2016] I was awarded the SmartStart2 funding for the following year to conduct research and prepare my future PhD project at the labs of Matthias Bethge and Andreas Tolias.

Publications

(2019). Learning Divisive Normalization in Primary Visual Cortex. In Biorxiv.

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(2019). Rotation-invariant clustering of neuronal responses in primary visual cortex. In Accepted to ICLR 2020.

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(2019). Deep convolutional models improve predictions of macaque V1 responses to natural images. In PlosCB 2019.

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(2018). A rotation-equivariant convolutional neural network model of primary visual cortex. In ICLR 2019.

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(2018). Diverse feature visualizations reveal invariances in early layers of deep neural networks. In ECCV 2018.

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Talks and Presentations

Contact

  • Maria von Linden Str. 6, Tübingen, 72076
  • DM Me