IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo (ISICNI)

The IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo is a meeting of international students, faculty, and teaching assistants for a three-week intensive course in Cape Town, South Africa. Imbizo is a Xhosa word meaning a gathering to share knowlegde. The Imbizo is not only about sharing knowledge from our diverse academic backgrounds, but also sharing our varied cultures and experiences that brought us to this particular point in time. The course is intense but leads to both neural and social connections that last a lifetime.

At the Imbizo, graduate-level students learn foundational principles of computational neuroscience (modelling the brain) and machine learning (constructing artificial systems based on ideas from neuroscience). In addition to lectures from domain experts, students learn by working on short-term supervised research projects in an area of their choosing.

I first participated in the Imbizo as a student (2017), and returned as a Teaching Assistant and Project Mentor (2020 - 2022) after gaining more research and teaching experience. As a teaching assistant, I participated in applicant selection and design of tutorial modules which would be most relevant to students. I created and taught a modules on fundamentals of neural networks, the mathematical foundations of deep learning, and principles of reinforcement learning (RL). I have supervised 24 short research projects over the years I have been a teaching assisstant with the Imbizo. Code and slides for tutorials and workshops can be accessed with the links below.

In 2024 I was invited to return as a faculty member during the Machine Learning cycle, where I lectured on reinforement learning, focusing on how neuroscience and AI think about sequential decision making problems similarly and differently. I also participated in a panel discussion on navigating the transition from academia to industry.