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. The school is aimed at students who are completing their masters or beginning their doctoral studies, and attracts curious minds from a broad range of scientific disciplines. 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 module on reinforcement learning (RL), including a lecture component and hands-on coding exercises. Subsequently supervised mini-projects of 6 students interested in problems in the RL space. Tutorial base code and slides can be accessed with the links below.