David Cox is a computational neuroscientist and machine learning researcher at Harvard University, affliated with the Center for Brain Science, the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. He is interested in understanding how our brains enable us to understand the torrent of complex and ambiguous information that we receive through our senses. A central premise of his research is that understanding how the brain works will enable us to build artifical systems that work the same way.
Prof. Cox received an A.B. from Harvard College in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from MIT in 2007. Since 2016, he has led the ARIADNE project, an ambitious multi-university effort to reverse engineer visual cortex. The project is funded by IARPA, and it promises generate one of the largest neuroscience datasets ever collected, with the goal of using this data to inform the development of new classes of brain-inspired machine learning algorithms.
Prof. Cox is also keenly interested in the intersection of technology and education, and he built "The Fundamentals of Neuroscience" (http://FundamentalsOfNeuroscience.org) one of the earliest Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) at Harvard. The course has been experienced by over half a million users in over 200 countries, and it is built on a custom platform that allows for experimentation with new modes of interactivity and user engagement that extend beyond simply posting lecture videos.