Sebastian Seung

He studied theoretical physics as an undergraduate at Harvard University (enrolled 1982 when 16 years old), taking graduate courses as a sophomore when he was 17 years old.[5] He then went straight into Harvard's graduate program and obtained his Ph.D. in 1990 under the supervision of David Robert Nelson.

Seung's 1990 doctoral dissertation is titled "Physics of Lines and Surfaces." It examines the statistical mechanics of vortex lines in high-temperature superconductors and uses tools such as the renormalization group perturbation theory. It then uses Monte Carlo simulations to analyze buckling phase transition behavior and critical phenomena, drawing comparisons with the Ising model and XY spin-glass model. Finally it introduces a continuum elastic theory for certain hexatic molecules.[13][14]

During his Ph.D studies he briefly interned at the Bell Labs in 1989. There he was introduced to the mathematical problem of neural networks.[5]

He completed his postdoctoral training at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He returned to the Bell Labs and was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department.[5] In 2004, he joined the MIT faculty first as a professor in physics and then as a professor in neuroscience.

It was near the end of 2005 when he made the switch from physics to neuroscience, which at the time was considered a risky career move. In November, one of his former mentors David Tank from the Bell Labs suggested a new problem to Seung: how does the brain work? He was invited to a neuroscience conference in Germany, and in January 2006 he brought two of his graduate students to learn about a new technology that imaged the brain in higher resolution built by Winfried Denk. It was then that Seung worked day and night writing grant proposals to fund computational research in connectomics, which at the time was seen as a "highly speculative engineering project."[5]

Since 2014, Seung joined the faculty at Princeton as a professor in neuroscience at the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics. Seung now leads a team working on an online citizen science project, EyeWire. It is human-based computation game about tracing neurons in the retina. The game was developed by MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research.[15]

In his 2010 TED Conference speech, Seung hypothesizes that the essence of a human being is his or her connectome. The complexities and vast amount of neural connections in the human brain has slowed the complete mapping of the human connectome. This is in comparison to the only completely mapped connectome to date, that of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a process that took over 12 years to complete despite the animal's hermaphrodite form only having a total of 302 neurons in its entire nervous system.[17]

Seung proposes that a connectome is like a riverbed. As the water of a river, neural activity is constantly changing, never staying still. The connectome is the riverbed which both guides the neural activity while also being shaped by the water over time. Illustrating how thinking and neural activity alters the connectome adding to the difficulty of mapping the human connectome that is constantly changing.

In his 2012 book Connectome, Seung discusses his current views on neuroscience and the upcoming science of connectomics. The book expands on some of the concepts discussed in his Ted talk as well as discussing how the doctrine of the connectome can be tested. He states that in order to test and further our knowledge and unlock to potential of the connectome we must improve the scientific tools in existence. Also, he states that there needs to be new ways to promote the concept of the connectome using the four R's: reweighting, reconnection, rewiring, and regeneration.[16]

EyeWire is a computer game developed by Seung designed to map neuron cells in the human brain. Users can sign up for free, and the game helps contribute to ongoing cutting-edge scientific research. In Seung's own words:

We have this new site: Eyewire.org. It is a citizen science project. Our AI is not accurate enough to map the connectome by itself. We still need human intervention. So we have now created this website that allows anybody to do it.[18]

Thusfar site has recruited over 130,000 players from over 100 countries.[4] KT Corporation, South Korea's largest telecom provider, recently partnered with EyeWire to advertise the game across the country and attract more players.

Essentially, in the game one has to identify and color connected components of neuron cells just from the 2d cross sections of brain tissue. As explained in his book "Connectome," up to now neuroscientists can only accurately image brain tissue using 2d sections (as opposed to 3d scans), which necessitates the need to splice these 2d pictures together to create a neural network map of the brain's inner connections. While artificial intelligence and computer vision can perform some of the manual work, it still takes a combined computer-human effort to map something as huge as the human brain, a computational endeavor that has perhaps never been attempted before at this scale in human history, hence the need for social computing.

In the same way the Human Genome Project and the complete mapping of human DNA has helped reveal a lot about human biology, Seung and other connectomists hope that a complete map of the human brain can reveal a lot about how we humans think and perceive, how memory works, important questions that has been asked since the time of Aristotle, and with connectomics we could be on the verge of answering them scientifically.

A team at Janelia plans to map the connectome of Drosophila by around 2025.[19] Seung also helped set up experiments with Tank and Nobel Laureate Richard Axel to find memories in the connectome.[5]