I am a programmer and researcher who wants to make computers more fun and empowering for students, researchers, and engineers. I thought the field was stuck, so I moved from computer science to neuroscience in search of ideas for making computers smarter. Then, to my surprise, the computers went and got smarter. Now, with all this low-hanging fruit around, I'm back to focusing directly on computers.

Here is my angle. Rather than focusing primarily on making things "easy", I think computers should encourage people to take ownership of all the complexity of whatever they are doing. Tools should be built for experts, with good on-ramps for everybody else. I am excited about LLMs and how they can make tools for experts more approachable for everyone.

Current project

Building Vexpr, a new Python library that embraces Lisp-like code transformation to make code readable, fast, and visualizable.

Building user interfaces that make people better at using machine learning models.

Photo

(Photo credit: Rosanne Liu, 2023)

Papers

Hippocampal Spatial Mapping As Fast Graph Learning
Marcus Lewis
Poster at 30th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (2021)
Efficient and flexible representation of higher-dimensional cognitive variables with grid cells
Mirko Klukas, Marcus Lewis, Ila Fiete
PLOS Computational Biology (2020)
A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex
Jeff Hawkins, Marcus Lewis, Mirko Klukas, Scott Purdy, Subutai Ahmad
Front. Neural Circuits (2019)
Locations in the Neocortex: A Theory of Sensorimotor Object Recognition Using Cortical Grid Cells
Marcus Lewis, Scott Purdy, Subutai Ahmad, Jeff Hawkins
Front. Neural Circuits (2019)

Other projects, big and small

Using Grid Cells for Coordinate Transforms
Marcus Lewis
Poster, Grid Cell Meeting 2018, UCL, London, England
Grid cells: Visualizing the CAN model
A weekend in April 2017
See HTM run: Stacks of time series
Written while living in hostels. February 2016
A visual running environment for HTM
Collaboration with Felix Andrews. November 2015