Conor Heins, Maching Learning Researcher at VERSES
Conor Heins (alumni from IMPRS-QBEE, started PhD in 2019) is currently a Machine Learning Researcher at VERSES AI, a US-based artificial intelligence start-up. Having obtained a Bachelors degree and Masters degree in Neuroscience (2015 and 2019, respectively), Conor started his PhD in 2019 in the group of Iain Couzin at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, enrolled in the IMPRS for Organismal Biology (now, IMPRS-QBEE) PhD program. His work and research interests over the years have moved between several disciplines, starting with animal models to study the neural basis of substance abuse and addiction, then moving into computational models of human eye movements, and most recently during his PhD, focusing on collective animal behavior and the physics of complex systems. Now, at VERSES, Conor works on scalable, biologically-inspired approaches to intelligence as an alternative to the approaches currently dominating machine learning. His current work combines his past education in computational neuroscience with the skills essential to today's machine learning workflows (i.e., large, parallelized computations), which he was able to master during his PhD work while developing computation models of collective behavior.