Scott Gorlin

New domain name for life!

Watch Dr. Sinha’s lecture on Project Prakash to the MIT Alumni Association.

I won the Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching!  Many thanks to the MIT community and my 2008 Sensation and Perception class for the nomination.  See the press release and other award-winners at the MIT news office.

‘Prakash’ in Sanskrit means light. The goal of Project Prakash is to bring light into the lives of curably blind children and, in so doing, illuminate some of the most fundamental scientific questions about how the brain develops and learns to see.

Understanding how the human brain learns to perceive objects is one of the fundamental challenges in neuroscience. The dominant approach for studying object learning involves experiments with infants. This work has yielded valuable results, but the operational difficulties of working with babies limit the complexity of studies one can conduct.

Project Prakash allows us to adopt a powerful complementary approach. The Prakash initiative is beginning to create a remarkable population of children across a wide age-range who are just setting out on the enterprise of learning how to see. We have begun following the development of visual skills in these unique children to gain insights into fundamental questions regarding object learning and brain plasticity. A particular strength of this approach is that it affords us an opportunity to continuously follow the development of visual skills and associated neural markers from before the sight restoration treatment to after.

PyMVPA is a Python module intended to ease pattern classification analyses of large datasets. In the neuroimaging contexts such analysis techniques are also known as decoding or MVPA analysis. PyMVPA provides high-level abstraction of typical processing steps and a number of implementations of some popular algorithms. While it is not limited to the neuroimaging domain, it is eminently suited for such datasets. PyMVPA is truly free software (in every respect) and additionally requires nothing but free-software to run.

Although a backup of my repository is available here, it is highly recommended that you checkout the full project at www.pymvpa.org.