Tell us about the program visits...

Topic:
Tell us about the program visits; the research you did; or the courses you are taking. What about the visits surprised you?

To be honest, I don’t think that program visits are a hugely central part of the internship. Up to this point we have not had anything planned aside from the orientation. Instead, the research plays a central role.

I am working on a project in the SINAPSE laboratory, which is the neurotechnology research center, at NUS. The lab is the biggest I have ever worked in, with row after row of lab space and countless different projects. It is really fascinating and humbling at the same time.

I am working in the neural coding group, specifically on the working memory task project. We analyze neural data recorded from a monkey during a visual memory task in order to shed some light on how the brain encodes task-relevant information. Aside from the principal investigator, Dr. Shih-Cheng Yen, there are two others working on this data alongside with me: Aishu, a grad student, and Roger, a post-doc. The part that I am working on is seeing how important the timing of each neural spike is (temporal resolution) in decoding the target location that is being remembered by the monkey. This involves employing algorithms on the data to turn it into more data that can be analyzed using various techniques. It is very intriguing work and I have enjoyed both coding up the various steps in the analysis, as well as reading related literature to better understand the best way to analyze the data.