Orthogonal Research and Education Lab Activity Update: Nine Months of 2023
A brief review of what’s taken place during the first nine months of 2023 at OREL.
Thank you to Bradly Alicea and Amanda Nelson for contributions to this report.
Nine months have come to pass for the year 2023. We at Orthogonal Research and Education Lab wanted to reflect and capture the zeitgeist of discussions taking place across our various meetings, including our Saturday Morning Neurosim general lab meetings; the DevoWorm Monday meetings; Google Summer of Code and Open-Source meetings on Fridays; and the Cognition Futures Reading Group, and other various project meetings. What follows is a general overview of broad themes, select deep dives topics, a brief overview from the “banners” within the lab, and a summary of events we’ve participated in and associated projects & publications.
Major Lab Themes
OREL is intentionally interdisciplinary and broad in scope, and different seasons often foster uniquely centered discussions.
Here is a brief overview of some macro-level themes taking place across our lab activities this semester, as well as some of the deep dives featured in our meetings:
- Critical Dichotomic Inquiry: discussions of digital versus analog computation, discrete versus continuous systems, and other core distinctions. We have also tried to address the following question: how do these dichotomies have salience, inform each other, or are flawed lenses?
- Philosophy & History of Sciences — and their Methodological Ties: Building theories does not occur in vacuum; for example, we’ve regularly considered the notion of how certain environments afford theoretical or concept development — and how said environments (or incentives) are required to appear at different historical moments for progress to be made.
- “Development, Learning and Evolution”: Another emerging theme in the lab is “Development, Learning, and Evolution”. This involves crossover between DevoWorm and Representation Brains and Phenotypes but is also influenced by Cognition Futures as well. The goal is to unify our discussions and research directions that connect variation and diversity over multiple temporal scales. Understanding the roots of plasticity and change over multiple scales is also of interest.
- Mixed Reality: At our Saturday NeuroSim meetings, Bradly Alicea has gone into a number of deep dives on concepts and trends in the world of extended reality (XR). These deep dives are an extension of the Principles of Bits to Matter to Mind Discord server activity. Bradly has also created a YouTube playlist called Metaverse and Spatial Computing for Research which features demos of ways to do work, research, and present in XR. These would be carried over into our Friday gatherings on Google Summer of Code and Open-Source discussion topics.
- Honorable Mentions: Physical Computation and Causality — see Bradly’s excellent recap posts; the emerging theme of Morphogenesis and Diverse Intelligence (led by Jesse Parent), and the regular referencing of Michael Levin.
Events
2023 has been abundant in events attended and areas we’ve been able to share our discussions. What follows are snapshots of events we’ve participated at this year so far, in relative chronological order:
NYCWiC
ACM’s New York Celebration of Women in Computing (NYCWiC) 2023 featured a Research Talk session from OREL’s Society, Ethics, Technology team: “Key Concepts in Tech Carers (and Tech Ethics) in 2023: AI-Generated Content, Open Source + Open Data, and Beyond. Another successful event with nearly 200 students total — and standing room only for our talk! Our presentation had the following segments:
- Bradly Alicea: The Impact of New Technologies on Open-Source Projects.
- Valeria Schnake: Law & AI: Privacy Rights.
- Ankit Grover: Ethical Implications of Programmatically Generated Content.
- Jennifer Jiang and Jesse Parent: Open Data & Open Science (and DEI).
Further Reading: OREL’s Medium Post — Jesse’s Personal Recap
Note: Jesse was also a volunteering co-organizer for the year 2023 and will be reprising a similar role for 2024 — please reach out to him if you are interested in volunteering or supporting NYCWIC.
International Conference on Embodied Intelligence
OREL members had three presentations:
- Amanda Nelson: “Embodied Neurophenomenology”
- Bradly Alicea: “Critical Periods as Developmental Neurosimulation”
- Jesse Parent: “Developing a Survey of Methods & Philosophy for Embodied Cognition”
Further Reading: OREL Medium post on EI Conference 2023
HyperDigital Designs
At the first-ever Hyperdigital Design workshop within Cambridge Digital Humanities, OREL had two associated presentations, one by OREL partner Plot Twisters.
- Jenny Liu Zhang, Young-Kyung Kim, and Jesse Parent: “Designing ‘Twisterland’ — An online game nurturing agency through self-reflection”
- Jesse Parent: “Landscapes and Learning Objectives: FrontierMap and the Challenges of Imbuing Contextual Nuance into Research Practices”
Google Summer of Code
This year, we have four participants in the 2023 Google Summer of Code program: R. V. Rajagopalan (OREL), “Exploring Open Source Sustainability via Agent-based Modeling”; Vrushali Nandurkar (OREL) “Virtual Reality for Distributed Research”; Sushmanth Reddy Mereddy and Himanshu Chougule (DevoWorm): “D-GNNs: developing DevoGraph for computational developmental biology.” Good luck, and thank you to our mentors Bradly Alicea, Mayukh Deb, Ankit Grover, and Jesse Parent!
Further Reading: Google Summer of Code’s new History & Alumni page
Forthcoming Projects
ISPSM & WeRobot
We have submissions out to the 1st Annual Web Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM), as well as WeRobot 2023. While no decision has been made at the time of this post, our projects are in development as follows: furthering the Embodied Neurophenomenology topic (led by Amanda Nelson); analysis of analogies for the mind and brain (led by Jesse Parent), advances to the FrontierMap project (led by Jesse Parent), and further developments of OREL’s partner, Plot Twisters (led by the PT Team, including Jenny L. Zhang, Yung Kyung Kim, and Jesse Parent).
Further reading: Jesse’s reflection on WeRobot 2022
Neuromatch Academy
OREL has a long history of volunteering with and participating in the Neuromatch series, both conference and its annual summer school “Neuromatch Academy.” This year, Bradly Alicea will be reprising his role as a mentor for the Computation Neuroscience summer course, alongside summer school participants in the same or the Deep Learning course. We also plan to feature Neuromatch Academy associated topics during the month of July during our Saturday general lab meetings.
Further Reading: OREL Medium Posts on Neuromatch 4.0 and Neuromatch 5.0
BICA * AI
OREL has attended BICA (Biologically-inspired Cognitive Architectures) for three years. This year it is a hybrid conference (virtual/China). This year’s talk is “Super-performance: sampling, planning, and ecological information”.
Banner Updates
Constellations of discussion and projects fall under these major banners:
Education & Curriculum Development: Teaching, and discussion about how to teach and instruct continues to be a major theme. Some conversations seep into discussion about FrontierMap, or also the Cognition Futures Methods Project. Professional development is centered in GSoC & Open-Source meetings, alongside other internship efforts and JOPRO Mentoring materials. A discussion series about lab management, research planning, or distributed teams is on the docket.
Society Ethics Tech (SET): In the wake of NYCWiC 2023, there have been several new branches to follow. There is a potential Tech Ethics & DEI/B paper in the works with Jennifer taking the lead. Internal and external lab members have considered other policy related work. Open Source Sustainability-related projects are continuing through GSoC. Please take a look at our recent preprint “Open-source Community Sustainability using Agent-based Models”. There remains ongoing interest in machine learning and interpretability, as well as a tech-ethics related reading group around Norbert Wiener’s “Human Use of Human Beings”, led by Amanda Nelson.
DevoWorm (DW): DevoWorm is split between the Orthogonal Lab and the OpenWorm Foundation. The Orthogonal Lab conduit involves developing our Development, Learning, and Evolution interest group. DW has sponsored two projects through the Google Summer of Code program: maintenance of the DevoLearn software package, and development of work on GNN (Graph neural Networks) and TDA (Topological Data Analysis) applications to biological development. We have two publications for the update period: “Embodied Cognitive Morphogenesis as a Route to Intelligent Systems”, published at Royal Society Interface Focus, and “The Psychophysical World of the Motile Diatom Bacillaria Paradoxa”, published in Mathematical Biology of Diatoms. In our weekly meetings, we have discussed early life and the origins of embryos, the biophysical and topological underpinnings of phenotypes, and the intersection of microscopy and artificial life.
Representational Brains & Phenotypes: Representation Brains and Phenotypes is a Orthogonal Lab initiative that encompassing Cultural Computational Modeling, Developmental Braitenberg Vehicles (dBVs), Meta-brain Models, Morphogenesis, Proprioception, and Soft Materials, Computational Critical Periods, and the overarching paradigm of Developmental Neurosimulation. Work in this area allows us to evelop pieces of our Developmental AI roadmap. RBP is also the home of our work on PhASiC (Physical Intelligence and Augmented Intelligence), which includes our recent activities in the area of extended reality (XR) applications. During the first half of 2023, we have produced two preprints: “Super-performance: sampling, planning, and ecological information” (which is forthcoming in Studies in Computational Intelligence) and “Critical Periods and Developmental Neurosimulation”, both on the arXiv.
Cognition Futures: We’re now into nearly 50 meetings of the Cognition Futures Reading Group, and the work has been steady on our Methods Project. We’ve spent time following the Varelian lineage of phenomenological investigation (see this post inspired by Natalie Depraz take on “cardiophenomenology”), as well as considering theory and methods around Thomas Fuchs and others. The dovetails into philosophy and history of science, and the nature of paradigm development are plenty, and we hope to break into some experimental work as the year progresses.
Closing out the Year
Jumping to September 2023: When this post started coming together in July, much was on the horizon — and it’s been an exciting few months. September was the way, but now, it’s already here.
We’ve had acceptances in WeRobot 2023 and the International Society for Philosophy of Science and Mind (ISPSM), and continue to have fruitful discsussions in Cognition Futures, Friday Open Source, and even the bi-weekly reading group on Norbert Wiener’s “Human Use of Human Beings.”
We also do have internships and other opportunities available for Fall and Winter 2023 — so please reach out if you are interested in collaboration. Cheers to the rest of the year!
- Jesse Parent, OREL Lab Manager.
