Hi! My name is Maria. I build software to make analysis of neural data more efficient,
enjoyable and productive.
Modern neuroscience is producing immense datasets. Just take a look at the figure
at the bottom of this page. It visualizes locations of Neuropixel probes that were
implanted in the mouse brain in the International Brain Laboratory experiments. Each
dot is a recording and each recording can be 10's of gigabytes of processed data.
Analyzing this kind of massive data is the challenge that I build for.
I am in the final stages of the MITx Micromasters in Statistics and Data Science. I am
writing a thesis about the differential representation of animate and inanimate objects in the mouse visual cortex
using Allen Brain Observatory data and Google's Vision Transformer (
animate-inanimate unsupervised visualization).
For my day job, I work as a Machine Learning Engineer at Estonia's Ministry of Justice on LLM's applied
to various legal tasks, such as document classification, information extraction and summarization. Here's
hobby visualization of US Supreme Court decisions (
SCOTUS visualization).
I would like to acknowledge the scholarships I have received to go to
neuroscience summer schools: Princeton Neuroscience Inststitute's course on "Neurotechnologies
for the analysis of neural dynamics", Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology's Computational Neuroscience course,
Berkeley University Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute's course on "Data Mining and Modeling in Neuroscience" course,
Tampere University's Baltic-Nordic Neuroinformatics summer school,
Human Brain Project's course on "Future Medicine", Bristol University's
Computational Neuroscience course.
The touch pad above shows the sensitivity pattern
to stimuli in the visual space of groups
of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1)
of the mouse. Images that the mice were
viewing were regressed against these
neural activity components to visualize
the ensemble receptive fields of cortical
cells. I worked on an algorithm (
EnsemblePursuit) that this visualization is based
on with Carsen Stringer and Marius Pachitariu while I was consulting
at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus.