Social Event: Dinner
We are delighted to invite you to our next INN social, which will be a dinner following The Virtual Brain Workshop at Jerusalem Shwarma. This venue offers a fantastic Middle Eastern menu with halal options, and it’s a great setting for a relaxed evening of conversation and connection after the day’s sessions.
Date/Time: Friday March 6 2026, 6pm
Location: Jerusalem Shawarma Vancouver, 560 Robson Street, Vancouver
Cost: $20-35pp before tax & tip
Please RSVP by March 1st by emailing our social coordinator, Taha Yildirim (taha_yildirim@sfu.ca).
Research Training Workshop on NeuroAI
Title: Unsupervised discovery of sequential patterns in continuous temporal data using VQ-VAEs
Description: In this workshop, we will be covering theory and practice for a relatively recent technique using vector-quantized autoencoders (VQVAE) for multidimensional temporal data clustering using deep neural networks. We used VQVAEs to learn a motion vocabulary for temporal data (e.g. a human skeleton-based motion capture dataset), and we suggest how it might be extended to EEG data or similar. Attendees will learn the theory behind autoencoders and their vector-quantized variants, used extensively for recent deep neural multimodal tokenization (e.g. for speech, video, images), and come away with understanding of Python code of VQVAE applied to human neural data.
Facilitators:
Dr. Angelica Lim is an associate professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Director of the ROSIE Lab (Robots with Social Intelligence and Empathy). She develops artificial intelligence models of nonverbal communication, including facial expressions, body gestures and speech prosody, to build empathic, context-aware and compassionate machines. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration with psychologists, cognitive scientists, clinicians and neuroscientists, advancing responsible and human-centered robotics. She is the creator of the SFU CS Teaching Toolkit, the author of Python Practice Lab (Princeton Univ. Press), and has received multiple teaching awards at the university level.
Payam Jome Yazdian is a Ph.D. student in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He received his BSc degree in Software Engineering from the University of Sistan & Baluchestan, Iran, in 2014 and his MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from the University of Tehran, Iran in 2017. His main research interests include Affective Computing, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Cognitive Science, and Machine Learning.
Requirements/Prerequisites:
- A laptop with a web browser capable of running Google Colab / Python Jupyter notebooks
- Proficiency in Python
- Experience with data processing
Date/Time: Thursday March 19th, 10:30am-12pm PDT
Location: Burnaby campus & online
Register by emailing inn@sfu.ca. Please indicate whether you will attend in-person or via Zoom. This event is open to all but space is limited and priority will be given to INN trainee members.
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