Dr Rui Ponte Costa
Expertise
I develop unifying theories of learning in the brain that are inspired by machine learning algorithms.
Current positions
Visiting Associate Professor
School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology
Contact
Press and media
Many of our academics speak to the media as experts in their field of research. If you are a journalist, please contact the University’s Media and PR Team:
Biography
I did my PhD at the University of Edinburgh (UK) as part of the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation where I established a collaboration between theoretical (Mark van Rossum) and experimental groups (P. Jesper Sjöström). I was also a visiting PhD student at University College London (UK) and McGill University (Canada). After that, I conducted postdoctoral research in computational neuroscience & machine learning at the University of Oxford (UK) with Tim Vogels where I established collaborations with the groups of Nando de Freitas (Oxford/Google Deepmind) and Nigel Emptage (Oxford). During my time at Oxford I co-organised the Oxford NeuroTheory Forum. Next, I did a short postdoc with the group of Walter Senn (Bern, Switzerland) in collaboration with Yoshua Bengio (MILA). In 2018 I moved to the University of Bristol to start my own group (Neural & Machine Learning group).
Teaching
Currently involved in three units: Machine Learning, Information Processing in the Brain and Math for Computer Scientists A.