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BSTP Report - Neuroscience in Action: My Journey Across Finance, IT, and AI

Neuroscience in Action: My Journey Across Finance, IT, and AI

My background is in the finance industry, where my work involved building statistical models of economic data and financial markets. In general, this work sought to use numerical approaches to evaluate the extent to which empirical data can be explained by theoretical models, and my interest in neuroscience was initially driven in part by a desire to see how similar approaches could be used to inform our understanding of the brain.

Over the course of the BSTP, I was struck by the extent to which neuroscience operates on multiple scales, including that of synapses, neurons, neural circuits, functional regions and large-scale networks. The hierarchical way in which cognitive function can be broken down into more fundamental concepts seemed potentially analogous to similar layers of complexity that exist in computer systems, and when the program ended shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, I decided to use my time during the social distancing period that followed to learn the basics of computer engineering.

This transition into IT ultimately led me to engage in research on software development, initially with tools from my previous work. I hope to expand this work via the use of language models, and when looking into neural network architectures, I've frequently encountered concepts that I was first introduced to at RIKEN CBS. It's been helpful to think of AI and the brain as alternative models of information processing, and I've thus found my time in neuroscience to be quite valuable, even though I'm no longer directly connected in the field.

Altogether, I greatly value the opportunity I had to participate in the BSTP and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in pursuing brain science, including those who may be considering making use of what they learn in a nontraditional way.

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