Technical Interests

My primary technical interest is in systems that adapt: how to analyze them, how to understand them, how to build them. Because the most flexible and competent adaptive systems available to us is the nervous system, I'm interested in artificial neural networks and computational neuroscience. I'm most fascinated by the construction of novel architectures and algorithms that enable us to understand and attack previously unassailable problems, and to understand previously mysterious aspects of nervous system function.

For specific projects, see also the Brain and Computation Lab Research Projects page. Here is a broad overview of my personal interests.

A secondary interest of mine is in programming systems, especially advanced programming language design and implementation. We have a nascent effort to build a new efficient advanced programming language with generalized robust performant automatic differentiation operators. The hope is to allow many numeric algorithms and scientific computations to be expressed more clearly and very succinctly.


Barak Pearlmutter <barak@pearlmutter.net>