https://patrickdkwatson.com/blog daily 0.75 2020-08-17 https://patrickdkwatson.com/blog/entry-02-ll7ps monthly 0.5 2020-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597233263921-8MB1J0A2VUY83UT2S21U/EdeSULSWoAAmOI_.png Blog - Game: Sojourn in Level 1 - Sojourn in Level 1 Free RPG day! Sojourn is a game I’ve worked on with my game dev partner for a long time. It’s so lightweight I use it as my business card at cons. Imagine you’re going on a long journey. Pick three of the following to take with you, explaining how each will aid you: Axe, Fire, Potion, Dog, Ghost, Imp, Key, Compass, Mask. For some reason, these 9 items resonate differently with different people. Some folks love the Dog, others don’t give it a second glance. Some react positively to the Mask, others think anyone who picks that should be immediately regarded with suspicion. The real game happens in these discussions, and it can get heated. Love the opportunity to have it in Level 1 with a cool layout and representations of each of the 9 items! Check your local game store. https://patrickdkwatson.com/blog/entry-04-8nnxx monthly 0.5 2020-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597244619209-GTGVNMXRGBLQ7YBUSG4O/Screen+Shot+2020-08-12+at+11.03.25+AM.png Blog - Patent: Blockchain for Open Science - US 10,659,239 B2: Blockchain for Open Science Research This was the first patent I wrote at IBM Research. Despite a slightly hyperbolic title, it’s not patenting the idea that you can use blockchain for science. I’m not even sure what that would mean. This is actually a patent that describes a way to write the outcome of a statistics program (like SPSS or R) to a blockchain. This is a super important step in keeping any kind of statistical analysis. Most statistical analyses tell you how likely a certain scientific outcome is. If it’s unlikely, we usually conclude that the reason it came out that weird way is because of an experimental intervention. But, importantly, unlikely outcomes are only unlikely if run your analysis exactly once. If you just sit there rolling dice until you get lucky, it’s always possible to get a cool, unlikely seeming result. Importantly, most analyses assume that you don’t do this. But this is impossible to enforce, we can’t sit there watching every grad student run multiple analyses and correcting their results for the number of times they run it. That would take some kind of vast network of interconnected computers and an immutable ledger—oh wait, yes we totally can. We just need to connect their statistics program to blockchain. And that’s what this patent was for! https://patrickdkwatson.com/blog/entry-01-675za monthly 0.5 2020-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597232998434-BTZVL4U3ZXTN5KFNXE5T/businesswizards_testcover.png Blog - Game: Business Wizards! - Business Wizards! A roleplaying game by Natalie Mesnard and Patrick Watson (Oat & Noodle Studios), Business Wizards brings much silliness and a meta take on the improvisational fun of traditional tabletop RPGs. Powered by the Polymorph one-die system, Business Wizards casts you as a wizard who is ALL BUSINESS! You will select spells, choose your department, and conduct a SWOT on your next adventure. Don’t forget to select the Scrum Master and wrap it all up with a 360 review! In Business Wizards you can: Attend STAFF meetings Get mad at the MIMIC copier Chat around the GELATINOUS CUBE cooler Summon COFFEE and much more! https://patrickdkwatson.com/blog/entry-03-bw4pp monthly 0.5 2020-08-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597243937577-F7QFGZUIHJU3ZYE3MFE5/profile.abaf809d.jpg Blog - Patent: VR Motion Capture - US 10,657,656 B2: Virtual Generation of Labeled Motion Data. This is a patent I worked on with my friend and colleague at IBM Marco Cavallo. Marco is OBSESSED with VR and cool visualizations and loves to invent things that make use of these technologies. This patent we wrote describes a way to scramble input from a Kinetic to create a bunch of labeled motion data for variations on different kinds of behavior: waving, dancing etc. This is helpful for machine learning, and just for calibrating VR systems to help them better understand the weird movements that people sometimes do. https://patrickdkwatson.com/blog/class-pre-cap-practical-data-science monthly 0.5 2020-08-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597250970889-OY3SWY81VR0XZ7IYWTF6/noun_Computer_2307974.png Blog - Class: Practical Data Science - My most popular tutorial at Minerva is Practical Data Science. This class focuses on developing skills rather than learning new topics. Students typically attack a data science challenge on Kaggle. Now, I think that knocking off Kaggle challenges isn’t actually a super important skill for a data scientist. But trying is a great way to learn why that is. More important: it’s a real project. There’s real money on the line. It’s condescending to give students, especially seniors, a toy project. My students never fail to impress, here’s a great example of the group project from last spring: Cactus Detection https://patrickdkwatson.com/contact daily 0.75 2020-08-10 https://patrickdkwatson.com/home daily 1.0 2023-07-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597247921689-UJ647AKYCIX882NBW5V8/face2.jpeg Home - Patrick Watson teaches Neuroscience and AI at Minerva. He helps robots cheat on science tests, and writes on love, amnesia, and radical pedagogy for cyborgs. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/939e48a8-dcae-46ae-a7e2-a24418770ac8/21158508-d12e-47e0-a27b-7b783f7d9fba_832x832.jpg Home - How to Get Smarter with Neuroscience Writing on the weird world of thinking things: algorithms, animals, people, systems, and neural tissue. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783034021-TA1TYC35FEFV2R3073M7/noun_Patent_2080702.png Home Layered Stochastic Anonymization of Data This patent describes how to train Deep learning on medical images while maintaining the privacy of the patients in the images. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783438821-0BPKMZG9T9QI9VJADVOD/noun_Patent_2080702.png Home Blockchain for Open Scientific Research This is a patent describes how to check in statistical analyses to a blockchain to help prevent p-hacking and keep an auditable record of how scientists are using their data. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597782310885-BO5KB5WB8ZL0SD4Y1NKM/noun_classes_2746928.png Home Network Neuroscience 2019 Check out one of my favorite student projects from my 2020 senior Network Neuroscience tutorial. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597782815117-ZABXM536GTC7E03KPHEN/noun_Brain_1864520.png Home The Role of the Hippocampus in Flexible Cognition and Social Behavior My most cited paper, a review co-written with Dr. Rachel D. Rubin. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783645429-ERQEQY69MZCLG13T7BX2/noun_classes_2746928.png Home Formal Analyses 2020 This semester I’m teaching Minerva’s Mathematics Cornerstone—Formal Analysis. This class introduces logic, statistics, Python coding, derivatives, and decision theory. It’s one of my favorite classes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783068056-EZPNES8XTM3JTPME9I7K/image-asset.png Home Virtual Generation of Labeled Motion Data A VR/AR patent on generating deep learning training data from people dancing in a VR point-cloud. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597782273177-L5TVYPYEOWWG2MP0FWUS/noun_invention_3341816.png Home Human-level Multiple Choice Question Guessing Without Domain Knowledge This is the paper in my bio! I used dirt-simple NLP to take a middle-school science exam. It didn’t know any science, just multiple-choice guessing techniques. It did almost as well as the worlds best science exam bot, and better than middle schoolers. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597781982009-STW6T1M8ZLW9F639AA26/noun_Brain_1864520.png Home Underlying Sources of Cognitive-Anatomical Variation in Multi-Modal Neuroimaging and Cognitive Testing I did stats to identify how people’s brains actually differ anatomically. There’s a number of different interesting developmental contributions to the final shape of your brain! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597782139067-VHL1KYVA3ZLH97V4XIIM/noun_Brain_1864520.png Home Enhanced Learning through Multimodal Training A huge cognitive training project involving exercise, meditation, brain stimulation, and video game training. People learned a little better, but you probably shouldn’t be rushing out to buy a brain stimulator. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597782218705-J9GEI350QJQ18UZOUISO/noun_Writing_2127115.png Home Nymph A creative nonfiction essay about growing up in Missoula, Montana published in the Camas “Rivers” issue. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783200341-BV6QV4F1DHOTC8S705DQ/noun_invention_3341816.png Home Predicting Transfer Learning for Images and Semantic Relations This paper is about how to identify which previously trained computer vision model has the most in common with a new data set. This helps when new data sets are small. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597782070701-SBUNFPJG2FC6FNKT47NC/noun_Writing_2127115.png Home The Half-Sacred Disease A creative nonfiction essay co-written with Natalie Mesnard, published in the Kenyon Review Online Poetics of Science issue. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597782381521-8LIHDE499IKNYWGZOEJA/noun_classes_2746928.png Home Practical Data Science 2019 Check out some of my favorite student projects from my 2020 senior Data Science tutorial. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783623039-WLPUNJI24MWKXLJKYN87/noun_classes_2746928.png Home Reinforcement Learning 2020 Check out some of my favorite student projects from my 2020 senior tutorial on Reinforcement Learning! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783672250-E2BHH1N3UZ9BICY3P6XU/noun_Book_1189982.png Home Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation A book co-written with Thomas J. Anastasio, Kristen Ann Ehrenberger and Wenyi Zhang published by MIT Press in 2012. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f318b0df4c20a095e3ae959/1597783369040-WQXDVOT4MUZFF9Z8WPXA/noun_Dice_10654.png Home Sojourn A micro-RPG published in the 9th Level Games 2020 Level 1 Anthology for Free RPG Day. Choose three meaningful symbols to bring with you on a long and dangerous journey.