We just interviewed an electrical engineering hire foisted upon us by the college dean. I suspect he wants my dept to pay the other 50% of his salary.
Dude is….not our vibe. My gos the teeth that were bared at his job talk, phew! Homedude could not cite a place he could improve. A textbook narcissist fr. His research is prolific and productive and he comes with hella connections our students need.
I asked him how his research, tuned to thalamus models of human vision, adapts to active sensing. He presents his work as though the sensors are sedentary and not strategically placed and varied across the compsite scene. He then tried to go tit for tat with me on LGN processing and organization. He was like there are channels in LGN and I’m like yes but they are no longer retinotipic, so you are building the field composition at that point. He was wrong but spoke with so much confidence that I got flustered and had to google LGB processing. I was definitely correct.
He then tried to tell me we don’t ID eyes til after V4. Like bro what??? Eyes are Gabriel functions, we’re tuning to them saccadically with info from MGN! Way before v1 processing! He said the percept of visual quality is instantaneous. Like…my guy it is not. The general rule of brain processing is the harder the task the longer the process. Information varies across the composite visual scene. Where aberrations are in the visual field affects detection. He also was like we don’t know why GSM is the underlying structure of visual processing. Hug?? Because naturalistic stimuli of all kinds follows the power law which is the FFT of a Gaussian and Gaussians dictates most cosmic phenomena. This is first year (computational) neuroscience. I don’t… I can’t. An electrical engineer stumbled across neuroscience and uses it to be flashy but is not actually informed. Barf on my shoes.
If I had time and funding sometime in his method and be like “you don’t have tot use the whole image just where places we are likely to look, which are driven by high contrast edges and peripheral motion.”
I think if he’s what it takes to appear the dean we (meaning I) can manage. I’m walking into the office and the ick level is rising. The childlike way he spoke to me and the implied disruption he expected to face in his classrooms and the “defensiveness” he “worked through” when bringing a pitch to the Deaf and HoH community all make me worried for the mental wellness of our students.
I’m gonna reach out to some idiot processing folks and see if they be heard of him and chat about sparse sensing. Just to check my sanity. Anyway..that’s my vent for the day.