Biologically-Inspired Computation Group

Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, School of Medicine and Public Health
Department of Computer Sciences, College of Letters and Science
6785 Medical Sciences Center (MSC)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1300 University Ave
Madison, WI 53706
email: mhcoen@{biostat, cs}.wisc.edu
Office: (608) 265-3712
Fax: (608) 265-7916

A map between the Medical Sciences Center and the Computer Sciences Building

My primary research interest is self-supervised machine learning, based on biologically inspired models of learning in animals. Reciprocally, I'm also interested in computational models of in learning biological systems. My research is motivated by the observation that animals routinely solve extremely difficult, nonparametric learning problems during development. The goal of my work is to create more sophisticated computational systems by understanding how animals do this.

Toward this end, I particularly love the study of clustering, the structure of inductive bias, and unsupervised segmentation of fMRI data. I'm also into financial (and other time series) data prediction -- a lingering aftereffect of working on Wall Street for several years. I'm currently on the Program Committees for ICML 2008 and AAAI 2008.

My Ph.D., S.M, and S.B. degrees are from MIT, where my doctoral thesis received the Sprowls Award for best dissertation in Computer Science. And once upon a time, I attended the wonderful Stuyvesant High School in NYC.

Language and concept acquisition are among my favorite topics and you can watch the workshop Bob Berwick and I recently organized on Re-examining The Poverty of Stimulus Hypothesis.

I'm accepting additional students into my research group. Drop me a line if you'd like to talk about this or anything else.

P.S. This (Drupal-based) website is just getting set up. It will eventually contain all the expected stuff, e.g., publications, students, favorite Simpsons episodes, etc.

Classes:
Computational Cognitive Science (CS838) Spring 2008
I'm scheduled to teach Artificial Intelligence (CS540) in the Spring of 2009.