Manu Srinath Halvagal

About

Manu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in SueYeon Chung’s group. He received his Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, where he studied prediction as a unifying normative principle underlying synaptic plasticity in the brain as well as self-supervised machine learning.

Previously, Manu studied Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and Robotics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He also spent half a year as an intern with the Robotics AI team at Amazon, in Berlin.

Research Focus

Manu is broadly interested in questions at the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience. He currently works on investigating how biological and artificial neural networks learn to transform complex sensory inputs into structured representations. He specifically focuses on developing a mechanistic understanding of predictive self-supervised representation learning, both as an abstract learning objective for artificial neural networks as well as a driving principle behind learning in biological sensory networks.