I am a researcher in neural computation and particularly interested in the mathematical and computational foundations of distributed compositional representations in message-passed systems.  This includes, for instance, computations within cortical areas, behaviour in swarms, locally distributed computing, or deep neural networks, to name just a few. I focus my work on emergence, self-organization, self-construction, plasticity, and collective behaviour, and how such dynamics can lead to stable computations within non-linear dynamical systems. My goal is to identify the fundamental algorithms & data structures that not only explain these properties, but also follow from first-order principles with as few parameters as possible.