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Alex Bäcker, Ph.D.
Positions available now! Email careers
qless.com with a CV.
Read Alex Backer's wiki/blog/wikiblog.
Partial list of scientific publications here.
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Affiliations. A more up to date description of my activities can be found in my wiki. I am a scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. Before that, I was a scientist in the Computational Biology Department of the Computation, Computers, Information and Mathematics Center at Sandia National Laboratories and a visiting scientist at the Biology Division, the Beckman Institute and the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
Interests. Bits, Brains and Genes. My interests include the meaning of meaning, knowledge representations, learning, networks, genes, brains, information and evolution. More generally, I am interested in a broad set of conceptual problems at the interface of information, biology, computation and mathematics, including understanding how the brain performs actions that we cannot yet replicate with machines and designing algorithms to solve them. Particular areas of recent work include information retrieval, cognition, neural coding, olfaction, the role of synchronization in neural coding, self-organizing learning systems, data mining, bioinformatics, economic behavior and evolution. You can read more about some of my research interests and projects here.
Brief Bio. I learned to program at 10 with a TIMEX 1000, with all of 2 Kb of RAM. 1st place in Argentina's National Informatics Olympiad led to the opportunity to represent the country at the International Olympiads of Informatics three years in a row. After graduating from St. Andrew's Scots School, I studied chemistry and biology at the University of Buenos Aires, and physics from Feynman's Lectures. I continued my studies at Harvard and MIT, from where I graduated with an S.B. in Biology and a minor in Economics. I got a Master's in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech, where I also became interested in student government and became the President of the graduate student body, receiving the Dean's Award for "great contributions to Graduate Life and outstanding qualities of Leadership and Responsibility". After a brief stint as a consultant with McKinsey & Co., I completed my Ph.D. at Caltech in the Biology and Computation and Neural Systems (CNS) programs, as a Fellow in the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology. I then joined Sandia National Labs as an independent scientist and spent a year as a visiting scientist in Christof Koch's lab and as a member of the "Brain Team" of Sandia's Advanced Concepts Group. In 2004, I founded Adapt Technologies, a company pushing the frontiers in representation of meaning which developed the world's first evolutionary marketing solution. In 2007, I founded abInventio, the invention factory, which has since launched QLess, the mobile queueing company.
Contact me at alex
� Copyright 1996-2010 Alex Backer.
