Mila > Team > Pouya Bashivan

Pouya Bashivan

Associate Academic Member
Associate Academic Member
Assistant Professor, McGill University
Pouya Bashivan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physiology at McGill University, member of the Integrated Program in Neuroscience and an associate member of the Quebec AI Institute (MILA). Prior to joining McGill University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at MILA working with Drs. Irina Rish and Blake Richards. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, working with Professor James DiCarlo. He received his PhD in computer engineering from the University of Memphis in 2016. Before that, Pouya studied control engineering and earned a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. degree in electrical and control engineering from KNT University (Tehran, Iran).
The goal of research in Bashivan lab is to develop neural network models that leverage memory to solve complex tasks. While we often rely on task-performance measures to find improved neural network models and learning algorithms, we also use neural and behavioral measurements from humans and other animal brains to evaluate the similarity of these models to biologically evolved brains. We believe that these additional constraints could expedite the progress towards engineering a human-level artificially-intelligent agent.