October 2024: Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis have been honored with the 2024 Robert Bing Prize by the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) for their “groundbreaking contributions to the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning”.
September 2024: Merkourios Simos received the HackaHealth Award for this Master’s thesis in the lab on imitation learning. In September, he will also start his PhD thesis — stay tuned for his first paper that we just submitted.
July 2023: Mackenzie W. Mathis and Alexander Mathis are the winners of the Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize 2023. The focus of their collective work is uncovering the theoretical and neural basis of mechanisms underlying adaptive behaviour in intelligent systems. Among other things, they developed the first animal pose estimation computer vision tool that requires little user input data, called DeepLabCut. This tool is regarded as a breakthrough in life sciences and is used in over 1,000 leading companies, institutes and universities around the world.
December 2023: Congrats team Lattice for winning the MyoChallenge track at NeurIPS 2023!
The Lattice team (Alessandro Marin Vargas, Alberto Chiappa and Alexander Mathis) has once again secured victory in one of the two MyoChallenge tracks at NeurIPS this year. Through the application of curriculum learning, reward shaping, and Lattice-driven exploration, they successfully trained a policy to control a biologically-realistic arm equipped with 63 muscles and 27 degrees of freedom. Their achievement allowed the arm to proficiently place random objects inside a box of variable shape. You can find our code here: https://github.com/amathislab/myochallenge-lattice
December 2022: Alberto Chiappa, Nisheet Patel, Pablo Tano, Alexandre Pouget and Alexander Mathis won the inaugural MyoChallenge at NeurIPS 2022! You can learn more at the article on this competition track and a Neuron paper where we discuss our solution in detail and illustrate what we learn from this about biological motor control.