Dr. Richard E. Turner Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Computational and Biological Learning Lab University of Cambridge Engineering Department Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, UK ret26-at-cam.ac.uk The Laboratory for Computational Vision 4 Washington Place, Room 809 New York, NY, 10003-1056, USA

Introduction
My work lies at the interface between neuroscience (which tries to understand the brain) and machine-learning (which tries to build algorithms which learn from data). The goal is to develop neuroscience inspired algorithms to solve problems which the brain solves routinely e.g. figuring out how many sound sources there are in an acoustic scene and what the individual contributions from each source are. The behaviour of these algorithms can then be compared to natural processing in the brain (e.g. neural activities or psychophysics) in order to better understand what they are doing. There are medical and engineering applications of this work, such as in cochlear implants for the deaf.

Here's my cv.

Current Highlights:

• New Conference Paper: Probabilistic amplitude and frequency demodulation. Awarded spotlight presentation at NIPS 2011. Supplementary material.
• New Journal Paper: Demodulation as Probabilistic Inference. There is an associated webpage with code and a listing of related publications here.
• A finished version of my PhD Thesis, Statistical Models for Natural Sounds is now ready. There are also a number of related audio demonstrations.
• Awarded an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant at the Interface for the Life Sciences. This is a prestigious three year grant that I will spend at the CBL Lab in Cambridge with Zoubin Ghahramani and at the Lab for Computer Vision, NYU with Eero Simoncelli.

Workshops and meetings organised

• Essential Tools for scientists meeting. A weekly meeting to discuss topics essential to scientific life, which are not formally taught. Things like unit testing, acceleration of code, reference management, version control, time-management, latex, presentation style, etc.
• Advanced probabilistic techniques workshop A two hour lecture on a probabilistic method (loopy BP, EP, DBNs, DPs and SMCMS) followed by coding up the method on a toy problem in a pair
• Beyond Simple Cells (BSC) workshop Computational modelers of visual cortex meet the physiologists whose data they try and model.

Papers, talks, and teaching

• Publications
• Public Talks
• Research Talks
• Short Talks
• Journal Club Presentations
• Research Notes
• Teaching

Sounds

• Audio demonstrations

Personal

• A collection of interesting problems
• Hyper-extension when skipping stones: Or why I am good at throwing things.
• Photos of me playing ultimate frisbee

last updated 14 Nov 2011