Welcome

I am a Ph.D. student in the Computational Neuroscience program at Brandeis. Working under the tutelage of Jordan Pollack in the DEMO lab. Serving out the fifth year of my sentence. Parole is imminent, hopefully this summer. Actually I am quite enjoying the Ph.D. experience, except for the spartan life style imposed by my exorbitant salary.
 

Research Interests

My research interests revolve around the brain and AI. Currently, I am particularly interested in how neural networks compute and generalize. Specifically feed-forward nets. Here, you can see a web page I put together on the exact analysis of multi-layer perceptrons. Forthcoming is a more general analysis method appropriate for a wider class of classifiers that is practical at much higher dimensions. Previously Jordan and I worked on ways to get recurrent neural nets to learn fractal attractors (see papers). With Simon Levy we've also worked on ways to understand RAAM networks, a form of highly recurrent neural network used for language analysis. My interest in general now is on how continuous input valued processing systems can generalize (and also learn).
  See also: Some papers, the DEMO Group
 

Additional Important Links

My jujutsu dojo's homepage- highly recommended. The best martial arts teacher I've ever had.
A website catering to Israelies in the US- has most of the things you need to know: cheapest phone rates, sources of information about Israel, community activities etc.
 

Contact Info

My Resume is available on-line. I will be looking for a position within a few months. If my background combining real-time/embedded computing systems with neural-networks and machine-learning is interesting to you, please e-mail me.
 
Ofer Melnik
Volen Center for Complex Systems
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02454-9110		 melnik (a) cs.brandeis.edu 
Phone: +1-781-736-2719
Fax :    +1-781-736-2741
 
 

Data Sheet (Note: Some answers borrowed from playboy)

Bust
100

Waist
100

Hips
100 (people call me the rubiks cube..)

Height
5'10"

Weight
75 kg - on a good day

Birth date
May-7th-1970

Ambitions
I want to be a famous actor and singer but still remain a business person.

Turn Offs
Mean people and stuff.

Turn Ons
Women and stuff

Favorite Book
Roget's Thesaurus - especially the part about refrigerators, ice-boxes ...what a writer

Favorite Song
Hava Nagila Hava - let us be merry

What makes a women sexy?
It should be coming from inside. She either is sexy or not. Nothing really can make her sexy. It is a quality given by God.

Describe a typical day in your life?
Start with exercising, then unicycling, dancing, singing lessons, massage and end with a wonderful evening with my friends.

Ideal Romantic Evening
In a beautiful castle full of candles, wearing a perfect outfit, dancing to romantic music and getting plastered.