Valuing an Engagement Surface using a Large Scale Dynamic Causal Model

With recent rapid growth in online shopping, AI-powered Engagement Surfaces (ES) have become ubiquitous across retail services. These engagement surfaces perform an increasing range of functions, including recommending new products for purchase, reminding customers of their orders and providing delivery notifications. Understanding the causal effect of engagement surfaces on value driven for customers and businesses remains an open scientific question. In this paper, we develop a dynamic causal model at scale to disentangle value attributable to an ES, and to assess its effectiveness. We demonstrate the application of this model to inform business decision-making by understanding returns on investment in the ES, and identifying product lines and features where the ES adds the most value.

Unsupervised Spiking Neural Network Model of Prefrontal Cortex to study Task Switching with Synaptic deficiency

In this study, we build a computational model of Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) using Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) to understand how neurons adapt and respond to tasks switched under short and longer duration of stimulus changes. We also explore behavioral deficits arising out of the PFC lesions by simulating lesioned states in our Spiking architecture model. Although there are some computational models of the PFC, SNN's have not been used to model them. In this study, we use SNN's having parameters close to biologically plausible values and train the model using unsupervised Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) learning rule. Our model is based on connectionist architectures and exhibits neural phenomena like sustained activity which helps in generating short-term or working memory. We use these features to simulate lesions by deactivating synaptic pathways and record the weight adjustments of learned patterns and capture the accuracy of learning tasks in such conditions. All our experiments are trained and recorded using a real-world Fashion MNIST (FMNIST) dataset and through this work, we bridge the gap between bio-realistic models and those that perform well in pattern recognition tasks