Portrait of Jan Gosmann

Hello, my name is Jan Gosmann

Background

I am a
Software Consultant

I am a jack of all trades, and master of at least some. Starting by putting servers into racks, managing the infrastructure, developing a back end, and ending by designing a front end, I do full stack development it its truest sense. But if I had to chose, I would pick the software development and software architecture aspects as the ones I enjoy most.

When I am writing code, I strive to keep it as simple as possible and to express its intent concisely and precisely without useless embellishments.

In my free time, I mainain and contribute some small open source projects. See below for a list of projects.

I was an
Interdisciplinary Researcher

During my academic career I obtained degrees internationally in Cognitive Computer Science, Computational Neuroscience, and a PhD in Systems Design Engineering. This broad background allows me to make sense of and integrate information from many different research areas. During my doctoral studies I built a spiking neural network model of short- and long-term memory that connects neuroscience and psychology. Besides that I made various contributions that advance the field of large-scale neural modelling.

See below for a list of publications.

Background

I am a
Rock Climber

When I started rock climbing in 2011, it quickly became another passion of mine. The sport requires a unique combination of physical fitness, mental focus, and problem solving. I prefer technical routes that tax my analytical problem solving skills.

See my The Crag profile for my ascents.

Projects

  • Nengo

    I contributed to various parts of the Nengo neural network simulator, including the core simulator, the web-based GUI, and Nengo SPA, an implementation of the Semantic Pointer Architecture. In particular, I conceived and implemented an optimizer increasing simulation times by almost a factor of 7. I also integrated decoder caching and the progress bar. On the GUI side my main contributions are related to refactoring and improving the websocket and HTTP server of the backend.

  • pylint-venv

    A module that provides a Pylint init-hook to have Pylint respect the currently activated virtual environment. This allows to use a single Pylint installation with multiple virtual environments.

  • Neo2 keyboard layout

    For the ergonomic Neo2 keyboard layout, I provided an improved keyboard layout file and accompanying Karabiner-Elements rules for macOS. These have now been integrated into the upstream layout.

  • Doveseed

    Doveseed is a minimalistic backend service for email subscriptions to RSS feeds written in Python.

  • dmarc-metrics-exporter

    Exports metrics derived from DMARC aggregate reports to Prometheus. This exporter regularly polls for new aggregate report emails via IMAP.

  • GopPy

    GopPy (Gaussian Online Processes for Python) provides an implementation of Gaussian Processes for Python with support for efficient online updates. At the time of development all existing Python modules required a complete retraining of the Gaussian Process.

  • Spykeutils

    I contributed highly optimized implementations of spike train metrics to the spykeutils project, a Python library for analyzing neurophysiological recordings.

Publications

    1. Jan Gosmann
    2. Chris Eliasmith
    Psychological Review, 2020

    CUE: A unified spiking neuron model of short-term and long-term memory

    1. Jan Gosmann
    2. Chris Eliasmith
    Neural Computation, 2019

    Vector-Derived Transformation Binding: An Improved Binding Operation for Deep Symbol-Like Processing in Neural Networks

    1. Jan Gosmann
    2. Chris Eliasmith
    Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 2017

    Automatic Optimization of the Computation Graph in the Nengo Neural Network Simulator

    1. Ivana Kajić
    2. Jan Gosmann
    3. Terrence C. Stewart
    4. Thomas Wennekers
    5. Chris Eliasmith
    Frontiers in Psychology, 2017

    A Spiking Neuron Model of Word Associations for the Remote Associates Test

    1. Jan Gosmann
    2. Chris Eliasmith
    PLOS ONE, 2016

    Optimizing Semantic Pointer Representations for Symbol-Like Processing in Spiking Neural Networks

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