About me
Short version
Bad biologist, worse programmer. Cognitive scientist by accident, just like you. Personal site; opinions are my own.
Longer version
At heart I am a biologist, but I borrow a lot from artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognition, and neuroscience.
I care about how and why animals communicate, and when I can I try to make that easier for everyone to study. For related libraries and tools I develop and maintain, please see: https://github.com/NickleDave#acoustic-communciation-in-animals-and-bioacoustics.
My PhD was in neuroscience, and my post-doctoral work was in cognitive science. My dissertation work in the Sober lab showed that connections which are known to be important for learning motor skills in humans and other mammals are also found in regions of the songbird brain that are important for learning song. As a post-doctoral researcher, I worked with Astrid Prinz on brain-inspired algorithms for continual machine learning, as part of a DARPA program. For more on this research, please see this section of my GitHub profile page: https://github.com/NickleDave#visual-search-and-visual-attention. For published papers and related work, please see my Google Scholar profile.
I am also passionate about open scholarship, broadly defined. I am a trained Carpentries instructor, and helped found a graduate data science group at Emory.
I like to hike, do a bad job of being an amateur birdwatcher, play video games, and fumble around on guitar. Before 2020 happened, I used to dance salsa and bachata. In a previous life I was a rock star and an underground cartoonist.