Hello, again...

From: Ben Houston (ben@exocortex.org)
Date: Wed Mar 27 2002 - 21:18:28 MST


Hi all,

It's been a while since I have checked out this email list -- I figured
that I would pop back in to see what's happening with this interesting
group and possibly contribute. Feel free to not read the rest of the
email -- it's just a brief summary of maybe relevant stuff I've been up
to.

I've been spending much of my time working on my ugrad thesis -- which
is due on April 11, 2002. I'm working with a molecular pharmacologist
[1] investigating the electrophysiology of specific types of receptor
subunit combinations in regards to certain drugs using a method called
patch clamping [2]. Basically this means that I slice up rat brains and
then using electrodes attached to individual neurons record their firing
rate (or related measures) while I change the drug composition of the
bath. It can be really exhilarating when you get recordings of
real-live neurons but it takes a lot of dedication since it is a lot of
work.

Recently I've been talking to a few program managers at DARPA about
transferring from the computer oriented project [3] I have been working
on during the summers to the new-ish BIO|INFO|MICRO program [4]. We'll
see if this arrangement can work out -- although I can rule out such a
change happening during the upcoming 8 months.

Other than the neuroscience lab work the only other interesting thing
(in regards to this list) is the C# coding that I've been doing. Maybe
someone remembers me talking about how much I thought that I would like
C# back in the summer? Anyways, I've got two fairly functional projects
of mine posted to the web [5,6]. I've been using
runtime-code-generation, reflection and xml to a fair degree but I
haven't yet got into the XML-RPC/SOAP stuff yet.

Recently someone though did contact me about joining a company or group
of people [7] that are building an AI down in California it seems. I'm
suspecting that many on this list already know about this project.

That's it for me. I have read a little of the last couple months of the
SL4 archives -- neat stuff. I noticed that there's a fellow Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada native on the list. Cool. :-)

Kind regards,
-ben houston
http://www.exocortex.org/~ben

References
[1] http://www.carleton.ca/~mpoulter
[2] http://www.bio.purdue.edu/researchlabs/rane/patch%20clamp
[3] http://dtsn.darpa.mil/ixo/cpof.asp
[4] http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrust/sp/bim/research.html
[5] http://www.exocortex.org/3dengine
[6] http://www.exocortex.org/dsp  
[7] http://www.optimal.org/a2i2/ai2.htm



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:37 MDT