Resources for teaching using Simbrain?

[DrTomWay]

Hi, I teach a college course in machine learning to non-technical students and have been limping along for a couple years using JustNN (which is Windows only) for the neural network part of the course. And WEKA is waaaay too heavy duty for my course. I'm so glad to have stumbled upon Simbrain and can't believe I didn't find it sooner!

I'm wondering if you can suggest the best examples that come with Simbrain or if you know of any other educators using Simbrain at a high school or college level who might be willing to share ideas or materials? Of course, I'll happily share anything that I create that would be useful to others.

Thank you so much!

Tom

[jyoshimi]

Hi Tom,

Ak!  I seem not to get all the notifiications that come through for this forum.  If ever you don't get a reply quickly here just email me (it's easy to find my email online).

I have all kinds of tutorial stuff.   One easy thing you can do is have them watch the Building a neural network ideo and IAC videos here

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuvRAuIyNiuRIrVnEztDr-Q

And then have them follow along and turn in a networks similar to the ones in the videos.   There is a folder called courseMaterials in the simulations folder that has some self-guided tutorials that are used in a psychology course in Syndney.    Beyond that I have a bunch of stuff of my own that I have not released, but that I'd be happy to show people and work on developing in to something that could be put in to the next distribution.

There are quite a few things that are almost ready to be tutorials, but aren't yet, like a hippocampus model, the actor-critic model, etc.    And though I've been lagging on videos, I can always make those on specific topics by request.

Cheers, and apologies on the month+ delay!

- Jeff

[jyoshimi]

Actually I just realized that what I just said may not be as relevant for machine learning.   Just let me know what topics you are interested in teaching (at this point, probably _next_ time you teach :) and we can think about options.

- Jeff

[Milo]

Hey there,

i know that this is an old posting, but i would be very interested in a hippocampus model since i'm trying to build one for my master's thesis. So if you could help out that would be amazing!

[jyoshimi]

Hi Milo,

As we've discussed offline, the model doesn't really work properly for Simbrain 3.0x.    It has, however, been updated, and for those with the technical chops to run from source, it's in the refactor 3.1 branch

https://github.com/simbrain/simbrain/tree/refactor3.1

https://github.com/simbrain/simbrain/tree/refactor3.1/src/org/simbrain/custom_sims/simulations/hippocampus


You can run it from the new top-part of simulation menu.

There are still problems with it, but I'd be happy to work on it with anyone interested.

- Jeff