Background and activities
The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd آنان که محیط فضل وآداب شدند
Who rose before us, and as Prohphets burn'd, در جمع کمال شمع اصحاب شدند
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep ره زین شب تاریک نبردند برون
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return'd گفتند فسانه ای و در خواب شدند
Omar Khayyam (translated by E. FitzGerald) خیام نیشابوری
. Professor, Kavli Inst & Centre for Neural Computation, Trondheim
. Research Staff Associate, ICTP, Trieste
. Corresponding Fellow, Nordita, Stockholm
I am interested in understanding learning and inference in living organisms and machines and for doing so, mainly use ideas from statistical mechanics and information theory.
I was born in Tehran in 1981, went to Alborz High School, and studied at Sharif University and SISSA. After that, I went to the Gatsby Unit, UCL, as a senior research fellow and then to Nordita, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. I have also been a member at the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study.
Scientific, academic and artistic work
Displaying a selection of activities. See all publications in the database
Journal publications
- (2019) On the complexity of logistic regression models. Neural Computation.
- (2019) Statistical Criticality arises in Most Informative Representations. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.
- (2018) Minimum Description Length Codes Are Critical. Entropy. vol. 20 (10).
- (2018) Maximum-entropy and representative samples of neuronal activity: a dilemma. arXiv.org.
- (2017) Learning with unknowns: analyzing biological data in the presence of hidden variables. Current Opinion in Systems Biology.
- (2017) Path integral methods for the dynamics of stochastic and disordered systems. Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical. vol. 50 (3).
- (2017) A Novel Mechanism for the Grid-to-Place Cell Transformation Revealed by Transgenic Depolarization of Medial Entorhinal Cortex Layer II. Neuron. vol. 93 (6).
- (2016) Variational perturbation and extended Plefka approaches to dynamics on random networks: the case of the kinetic Ising model. Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical. vol. 49:434003 (43).
- (2016) Sparse model selection in the highly under-sampled regime. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.
- (2016) Ten Years of Grid Cells. Annual Review of Neuroscience. vol. 39.
- (2015) Belief propagation and replicas for inference and learning in a kinetic Ising model with hidden spins. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment. vol. 2015.
- (2015) U.S. stock market interaction network as learned by the Boltzmann machine. European Physical Journal B : Condensed Matter Physics. vol. 88.
- (2015) Correlations and functional connections in a population of grid cells. PloS Computational Biology. vol. 11 (2).
- (2015) Multi-neuronal activity and functional connectivity in cell assemblies. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. vol. 32.
- (2015) Learning with hidden variables. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. vol. 35.
- (2014) Grid cells and cortical representation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. vol. 15 (7).
- (2014) L1 regularization for reconstruction of a non-equilibrium ising model. Physica Scripta. vol. 89 (10).
- (2013) Grid cells require excitatory drive from the hippocampus. Nature Neuroscience. vol. 16 (3).
- (2013) Recurrent inhibitory circuitry as a mechanism for grid formation. Nature Neuroscience. vol. 16 (3).
- (2013) Learning and inference in a nonequilibrium Ising model with hidden nodes. Physical Review E. Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics. vol. 87 (2).
- (2013) On sampling and modeling complex systems. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.
- (2013) The effect of nonstationarity on models inferred from neural data. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.
- (2013) Maximum Likelihood Reconstruction for Ising Models with Asynchronous Updates. Physical Review Letters. vol. 110 (21).
- (2012) Effect of coupling asymmetry on mean-field solutions of the direct and inverse Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model. Philosophical Magazine. vol. 92 (1-3).
- (2011) Dynamical TAP equations for non-equilibrium Ising spin glasses. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.