We are thrilled to celebrate the successful PhD defense and graduation of Dr Manu Srinath Halvagal, whose groundbreaking thesis bridges the fields of neuroscience and machine learning. His dissertation, titled “Predictive Self-Supervised Learning in Brains and Machines”, explores how the brain builds structured internal representations from sensory input and introduces biologically plausible learning models inspired by predictive processing and self-supervised learning.

From developing a novel plasticity rule (Latent Predictive Learning) to advancing our understanding of dynamic sequence learning (Recurrent Predictive Learning), Manu’s contributions offer exciting insights into both biological learning and the future of artificial intelligence.

We warmly congratulate Manu on his outstanding achievements and wish him continued success in the next chapter as a post-doc with SueYeon Chung at Harvard.