Education
| PhD in Informatics | June 2013 to May 2019 |
|---|---|
| Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences | Leipzig, Germany |
- Supervisor: Professor Nihat Ay
- Dissertation Submitted: October 2017
- Dissertation Defended: May 2019
| Master’s in Computational Neuroscience | October 2010 to May 2013 |
|---|---|
| Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience Berlin | Berlin, Germany |
- Supervisor: Professor Manfred Opper
| Bachelor of Science | May 2004 to May 2009 |
|---|---|
| University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada |
- Specialist: Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence
- Major: Philosophy
- Minor: Statistics
Bibliography
Peer-Reviewed
- Sacha Sokoloski, Amir Aschner, and Ruben Coen-Cagli, “Modelling the Neural Code in Large Populations of Correlated Neurons,” ed. Jonathan W Pillow, Joshua I Gold, and Kenneth D Harris, eLife (2021). [Link] [PDF]
- Sacha Sokoloski, “Implementing a Bayes Filter in a Neural Circuit: The Case of Unknown Stimulus Dynamics,” Neural Computation (2017). [Link] [PDF]
Preprints
- Sacha Sokoloski and Philipp Berens, “Hierarchical Mixtures of Gaussians for Combined Dimensionality Reduction and Clustering” (arXiv, 2022). [Link] [PDF]
- Sacha Sokoloski, “A Biologically Realistic Model of Saccadic Eye Control with Probabilistic Population Codes,” arXiv:1210.4145 [Cs, Q-Bio] (2012). [Link] [PDF]
Theses
- Sacha Sokoloski, “Implementing Bayesian Inference with Neural Networks” (PhD thesis, University of Leipzig, 2019). [Link] [PDF]
- Sacha Sokoloski, “Efficient Stochastic Control with Kullback Leibler Costs Using Kernel Methods” (Master’s thesis, Technical University of Berlin, 2013). [PDF]
Professional Activities
Conferences and Workshops
| Population Models Workshop | July 2022 |
|---|---|
| University of Edinburgh | Edinburgh, Scotland |
- Invited Talk: Exact learning and inference in large-scale probabilistic graphical models
| Cosyne | February 2021 |
|---|---|
| Online |
- Poster: Information-limiting correlations linearize the neural code (Sacha Sokoloski, Ruben Coen-Cagli)
- Poster: Neural sampling from bimodal distributions in primary visual cortex (Ruben Coen-Cagli, Adam Kohn, Sacha Sokoloski)
| Cosyne | February 2020 |
|---|---|
| Hilton Denver City Center | Denver, USA |
- Poster: Mixture of poisson models for neural correlations and coding
- Received travel grant
| Sense2Synapse | April 2017 |
|---|---|
| Rockefeller University | New York City, USA |
- Poster: Dynamic Bayesian Inference in the Brain
| International Conference on Mathematical Neuroscience | May 2016 |
|---|---|
| Antibes Juan-les-Pins Conference Centre | Juan-les-Pins, France |
- Talk: Learning to Filter Spike Trains when the Stimulus Dynamics are Unknown and Nonlinear
| HaL-10: Haskell in Leipzig | December 2015 |
|---|---|
| HTWK Leipzig | Leipzig, Germany |
- Talk: Typsichere Numerische Optimierung basierend auf Mannigfaltigkeiten
- English title: Typesafe Numerical Optimization based on Manifolds
Teaching and Mentorships
| Master’s Student Supervision | Winter 2022 |
|---|---|
| University of Tübingen |
- Supervised Jure Majnik on a lab rotation to develop code for the retinal-rl project.
| Google Summer of Code | Summer 2018 |
|---|---|
| Haskell.org |
- Mentored a student through the Google Summer of Code program on developing a library for parallel automatic differentiation for the Haskell.org organization.
- Project was overall successful.
Peer Review
- Nature Neuroscience (2022)
- eLife (2021)
- Nature Communications (2019)
- IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2017)
Employment History
Professional
| Postdoctoral Researcher | July 2021 to Present |
|---|---|
| University of Tübingen | Tübingen, Germany |
- Principal Investigator: Philipp Berens
- Project: Modelling neural circuits in the retina
| Research Fellow | October 2019 to April 2021 |
|---|---|
| Albert Einstein College of Medicine | New York, USA |
- Principal Investigator: Ruben Coen-Cagli
- Project: Modelling Bayesian inference in neural circuits and analyzing neural population response recordings
| Research Trainee | November 2017 to September 2019 |
|---|---|
| Albert Einstein College of Medicine | New York, USA |
- Principal Investigator: Ruben Coen-Cagli
Student
| Research Assistant | May 2012 to July 2012 |
|---|---|
| University of Geneva | Geneva, Switzerland |
- Principal Investigator: Professor Alexandre Pouget
- Project: Modelling sacaddic eye control using probabilistic population codes
| Programmer | August 2011 to May 2013 |
|---|---|
| Technical Unversity of Berlin | Berlin, Germany |
- Principal Investigator: Marianne Maertens
- Project: Developing software in Python to control scientific hardware for visual psychophysics
| Programmer | November 2009 to July 2010 |
|---|---|
| University of British Columbia | Vancouver, Canada |
- Principal Investigator: Professor Kurt Haas
- Project: Developing software in C to control a fast 2-photon microscope
| Research Assistant | April 2009 to July 2009 |
|---|---|
| University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada |
- Principal Investigator: Jun Luo
- Project: Writing an annotated bibliography in the Philosophy of Information & Computation
| Programmer | June 2008 to December 2008 |
|---|---|
| University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada |
- Principal Investigator: Professor Gerald Penn
- Project: Developing software in Prolog to estimate probability distributions over parsed linguistic corpora
| Research Assistant | June 2008 to December 2008 |
|---|---|
| University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada |
- Principal Investigator: Jun Luo
- Project: Coordinating the “Synesthetes” faculty meeting group, focusing on cognitive science and interdisciplinary research
| Programmer | December 2007 to August 2008 |
|---|---|
| University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada |
- Principal Investigator: Professor Fahiem Bacchus
- Project: Developing software in Java to schedule meeting times of potential graduate students
Miscellaneous
Summer/Winter Schools
| Dynamics of Multi-Level Systems | Summer 2015 |
|---|---|
| Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems | Dresden, Germany |
| Autonomous Learning | Fall 2014 |
|---|---|
| Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences | Leipzig, Germany |
| Deep Learning and Feature Learning | Summer 2012 |
|---|---|
| Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics UCLA | Los Angeles, United States |
| The Future of the Embodied Mind | Fall 2011 |
|---|---|
| European Project: Extending Sensorimotor Contingencies to Cognition | San Sebastian, Spain |
| Advanced Numerical Bifurcation Analysis | Summer 2011 |
|---|---|
| Danish Centre for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics | Copenhagen, Denmark |
Scholarships and Awards
| Network of European Neuroscience Schools | Summer 2012 |
| Scholarship for training stay in lab of Alexandre Pouget | |
| Sunflower Scholarship in Philosophy | Spring 2007 |
| Award for undergraduate writing in philosophy |
Notable Skills
Languages
- English (Mother tongue)
- German (Fluent)
- French (Working knowledge)
Computer Skills
- Programming Languages: Haskell, C, Python, Matlab, R, Java, Prolog
- Advanced Linux user
- Experience maintaining a software library with approximately 10,000 lines of code
- Experience writing software for interfacing with scientific hardware