Re: THE EPSTEIN BRAIN PROJECT

Dear Jeffrey,

Thank you for an opportunity to meet last week. The meeting helped clarify your priorities, which concur with my own. Like yourself, I believe that modeling is the most promising direction in understanding the brain. I think we are in a position to start our own "Blue Brain" project if you decide to proceed. Subsequent to our meeting, I had further discussions with several members of our putative "think tank" and as a result we can have an excellent team in place, consisting of the following:

Yann LeCun - Professor of Computer Science at Courant Institute, NYU - one of the top neural modelers with vast experience both in academe and in the "intelligent machines" industry. Together with me, he will spearhead the model development and will involve his post-doctoral fellows and doctoral students from NYU. He will be in a good position to judge if our models have an impact on real-life "intelligent machine" design.

Hakwan Lau - Assistant Professor of Psychology, Columbia U. - an Oxford-trained cognitive neuroscientist whose work combines neural net modeling and functional neuroimaging. He will be important for contributing neurocognitive expertise to the design decisions and will involve his doctoral students from Columbia.

David Silbersweig - Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Cornell Medical School, Director of Research in the Department of Psychiatry, and Director of the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory at Cornell, who has done seminal work in understanding various brain abnormalities.

Yann LeCun and David Silbesweig are among the most highly regarded members of their respective fields in the world. Hakwan Lau is among the most talented young neuroscientists in NYC.

The core of the project will be carried out by myself, LeCun and Lau (with yet-to-be identified post-docs and graduate students who will assist with various aspects of busy work: writing code, literature searches, etc). Silbersweig will serve as a consultant and will provide ongoing critical monitoring of the project to keep our models grounded in biological reality.

I would like to introduce the team to you, so you may make the decision as to whether and how you wish to proceed with the project. We are quite confident that with your support our Brain can become an exceptional scientific endeavor and we will be proud to name it "The Epstein Brain" :)
We look forward to hearing from you.
 
Best wishes,

Elkhonon

Elkhonon Goldberg, Ph.D., ABPP

Clinical Professor of Neurology
New York University School of Medicine

Diplomate
American Board of Professional Psychology
in Clinical Neuropsychology

315 West 57th Street
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New York, NY 10019
USA

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