Russell Hanson
Russell Hanson is a well-known biohacker and scientist pushing the envelope in neuroscience, AI, and biosensors and applications. His work in neurohacking and applications of AI to neuroimaging has been published in Nature and other specialty journals. After training in Boston at the Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he joined the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He serves as a founding partner or advisor to several biotech companies including Ligandal, Aptavid, and Brain Backups. His work has been featured in Wired, the Chaos Computer Club, and Vice. In his spare time, he likes to go paragliding.
Talks
Brain Backups: What's My Brain Got to Do With Me?
Imaging the human brain has remained one of the most outstanding scientific and technological challenges. With 86 billion neurons and an inter-neuron distance of one micron to 1/10 of a micron, developing technology that allows imaging the entire human brain in vivo at the so-called connectome-scale continues to elude even the best labs. In this talk, Russell will provide some motivating examples to show how human brain imaging can be relevant for technologists and hackers from a scientific perspective where popular media like Black Mirror and the like have left off. The possibility of backing up the human brain to a computer hard drive - the Brain Backup - is used as an illustrative example. Neural circuits, artificial intelligence, neural architecture informed AI, and other modern applications will be covered. Attacks and exploits may evolve as the understanding of the human brain advances.