As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’m particularly interested in interdisciplinary work, particularly in CS + X interdisciplinary work. So far most of the research I’ve done has been some variation of CS + Physics, with a strong emphasis in aeronautical and astrophysics research. However, recently I’ve been learning more and have been having a growing interest in neuroscience, psychology, and biology. 

This interest first started when I was learning about neural networks, which are designed based on the human brain. Artificial neural networks give us a lot of insight on how the human brain works, along with being great for Machine Learning tasks. I wanted to learn a little more about the brain, but specifically psychology, so I reached out to a psychology professor at UC Berkeley! She was so kind and taught me so much on a short 30 minute call with her. I visited the campus (about an hour away) and worked on an experiment with one of her grad students. 

The aim of this research is to create a case that there is a function in the prefrontal cortex specifically for second order functions (I’ll detail this in a later blog post). This work was so exciting, and being able to see a participant come and take the test, along with working through all the mappings of the data and using ML to visualize/predict was truly fascinating.  

On the same note, I’ve also been working on a project for the science fair this year. My project consists of creating a machine learning model that can hopefully help predict whether an individual has autism given a brain scan, specifically MRI. I also hope to analyze discrepancies between different demographics, such as age and sex, to see how we can best tailor this approach. Of course, this model will be used with the supervision of a professional, but it could help speed up the process and give insight into exactly what the model is looking at when making these predictions (through a heat map, or something of the sort). I’ll also detail my progress on this project in a later blog post, for right now I’m just getting started! 

That’s it for this blog post, thanks so much for reading and see you in the next one!