These notes are the first of many illustrated notes about my research, and science in general, that I will post.

This is An illustrated primer on constructing a circuit from optimization (click the link for the pdf). It details the approach I’ve used in my most recent research while I was a postdoc in Sophie Deneve’s lab at the Group for Neural Theory in Paris, France. I was working with Sophie’s predictive coding network with spiking neurons, so if you’re interested in the work from her paper (Boerlin, et al, PLoS, 2013), this closely follows their machine-learning-inspired approach to constructing a neural network of spiking units.