Shamit Patel wins National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship
Congratulations to Shamit Patel (CS, MS '12, BS '10) on securing the highly competitive National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG).
After graduating at the end of the semester with an M.S. in Computer Science, Shamit plans on pursuing his Ph.D. in Neurosciences–specializing in Computational Neuroscience–at the University of California, San Diego this Fall. The NDSEG fellowship will cover Shamit's education expenses for three years and offer a monthly stipend.
"I applied for an NDSEG Fellowship so that I could have the freedom to pursue the exact research that I am interested in," explains Shamit.
As a Master's student working with Professor Tim Oates, Shamit developed an implementation of Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George's Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) pattern recognition system based on an existing theory of the learning rule for dendritic integration: spike-timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP). "I found that the STDP HTM system achieved far better generalization ability than the baseline HTM system."
Shamit's doctoral research lies within the same vein. "My goal is to develop a working theory of the learning rule for dendritic integration by performing appropriate neurophysiological experimentation, and to then implement a pattern recognition system based on that learning algorithm so that the algorithm can be evaluated for its generalization ability."
Posted: May 7, 2012, 1:18 PM