Sane

1) CMU CNBC which is an "interdisciplinary training program" in neuroscience that can be taken on top of an ML degree. This is a Masters + PhD. 2) UW CS which has machine learning courses, and can be combined with a "Theoretical Neuroscience Diploma". This is just a Masters. Those are the only two I've found. It is surprisingly hard to find more instances of this combination. I want a mature coverage of ML and an overview of our attempts to understand and model brain structure and communication. My goal is to better understand learning and emergent behaviour at a mathematical and biological level. Research and laboratory exposure is a bonus. Masters is also preferable over PhD, to give a buffer to narrow my focus. FYI, I come from a CS background, have taken ML and AI at a graduate level while in undergrad, and have done ML work at a couple companies including Google. I have no experience in Bio or Neuroscience.

It's a little hard for me to do anything now, because I'm on a tight track to completing my double major. I will probably read some neuroscience books during my work terms. Maybe that will give me a better idea of what courses I need to take. Then, as you said, I could start looking for the right program. I'm not sure where I want to do my PhD. Part of the problem. I could potentially do it anywhere. But Waterloo, or other Ontario universities, may be preferable, to be with family. Waterloo looks like it has a really interesting neuroscience program: http://ctn.uwaterloo.ca/studies/gradprogram_details.html. It says it's an additional diploma on top of whatever masters or PhD program one might be taking. Ideally I'd be doing something like this, in conjunction with machine learning, throughout my master's and PhD.

Thanks for the advice. Yeah, my background is definitely the strongest in CS. Would that generally open better doors than applying to something less related to my undergraduate experiences? Conversely, will having no experience in Biology hurt my opportunities in Computational Neuroscience? This may also be a stupid question, but how much freedom do I generally get to pick courses and research? Does it depend on the supervisor? The worst case would be entering a Neuroscience PhD program, and not be able to (at least eventually) do research related to machine learning. I know a professor I could probably ask about this, but unfortunately he's on sabbatical. Edit: By the way, apparently Canadian PhD programs usually require a master's degree first, and also fund their masters students. Could I use that as my opportunity to get the breadth that I need?

Ouch. That is a tough decision. It may not be as impossible as you think to have a long distance relationship under these circumstances. 3-4 years is not a long time. I'm not sure what ABD means, but you may have to make a sacrifice somewhere. Since he's making that much, he can fly you down to see him every other weekend. If you really love each other, and are already planning to marry eventually, you can become engaged with the vow to marry once you have finished your studies. It's very hard, but it's not impossible. My roommate did this for the past three years during his undergraduate, and it worked out for both of them. What does he think, apart from his ideal result of you staying? Surely he must love academia as much as you do, and therefore be able to empathize with your situation right now.

Hey all. Hoping that I found the right place to post this. I was just looking for some smart people to get a few pieces of advice from, for planning out graduate studies. I finish my undergraduate at the University of Waterloo in a year's time. I'm currently planning to work my way to a PhD, but am unsure of where and what path I should take. My background is in Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization. I find myself very interested in the field of machine learning, but feel it's important to also learn psychology and neuroscience. This is because of the many real life problems where the machine learning model involves a component of human interaction. I'll try to be specific: I have found the field of machine learning to be lacking in many of the problem spaces that are prevalent today, namely those where the underlying function that we are trying to learn is a product of the human mind (or even many human minds together). Here, it's important to take into account many behavioral factors in modelling the hypothesis space, and to keep it robust enough to allow for varieties of learning biases (there's no free lunch, etc, etc). Sadly, very little robustness is seen in most techniques, and the human component is generally viewed as more of a black box with algebraic or Bayesian learning biases. I feel it's important to consider techniques that allow for more application specific modelling of the human component. I want to pursue a program that can allow me to explore some of these concepts in greater depth. I am unsure of what programs offer such a perspective. This is where computational neuroscience may come into play. But, I am not entirely sure, since I am only familiar with the machine learning side of things. Ideally, I would be researching new approaches of modelling the human mind and applying those models towards specific real world problems, such as predicting user relevancy and preferences. These are problems that I find all around us, from Facebook, to News websites, to advertising, to our next-level media platforms (e.g. Netflix). These are problems that I know companies are asking, and machine learning literature has begun to answer (e.g. collaborative filtering). Somewhere down the road, I wish to be doing research in these areas, as well as teaching Computer Science and Machine Learning as a professor. I'd like to know what school and program might be the best to get me there. Hopefully that is enough rambling of where my mind is at. I'll just mention some of my credentials, to brag, and to let you know of my capabilities. My undergraduate is a 5 year bachelors co-op, double majoring in Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization. My cumulative average is 92% and my 3rd-4th year average is 95%. I have performed at an international level in Computer Science competitions, and have worked for 8 months for a startup in San Francisco as the lead machine learning developer. I should also be able to obtain a decent recommendation from at least one professor at Waterloo. However, I have no experience in Biology. I do have 3rd year experience in Psychology. Sorry if that post was a little long. Just eager and looking forward to any thoughts. Thanks.