Orthogonal Research and Education Lab (OREL) is a distributed community of investigators pursuing interdisciplinary research and open science, while valuing the underpinning philosophy within disciplines and societal impact of advances in AI and other technologies. With projects spanning computer science, biology & neuroscience, and cognitive science & psychology, we foster collaboration and communication across diverse fields of study alongside development as researchers educators, and science communicators. OREL was established in 2014 by Director of Science Dr. Bradly Alicea.

Open Positions for Spring & Summer 2022!

Please see our Get Involved page to view internships and other ways to join our lab!

Lab News

• 06-26 Chicago OREL in-person meetup is a success!
• 06-10 2022 Annual International Conference on Brain-Inspired Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Intelligence accepts our paper “Layers, Folds, and Semi-Neuronal Information Processing”
• 06-03 Bradly Alicea presents at GSoC Mentor Summit
• 05-20 Congratulations to Himanshu, Brian McCorkle, and S. Hussain for being a part of OREL’s 2022 Google Summer of Code seeason (supported by the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility). They will be mentored by Dr Bradly Alicea and Jesse Parent.
• 04-23 Multiple presentations at The International Conference on Embodied Intelligence 2022.
• 04-19 OREL presents at New York Celebration of Women in Computing 2022.
• 02-25 2021 BICA proceeedings are now published!
• 02-07 Society Ethics & Technology team at OREL is accepted at ACM’s New York Celebration of Women in Computing 2022!
• 02-01 Welcome 2022 Spring Interns!
• 01-15 OREL solidifies partnership with University at Albany, SUNY’s undergraduate research center

2021

• 12-02 OREL presents 4 flash talks at Neuromatch 4.0
• 09-27 OREL invited to University at Albany, SUNY’s CURCE Hybrid Fall Fair
• 09-13 “Gibsonian Information: a perceptual approach to modeling the quantitative observer” at 2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information (IS4SI) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) workshop
• 09-03 Website Landing page update is underway!
• 08-17 - Congratulations Jesse Parent on acceptance to the National Science Foundation’s CISE Graduate Fellowship!
• 07-28 “Trajectories in Cognitive Science” Discussion Group at CogSci 2021, hosted and organized by OREL’s Congition Futures team
• 07-09 Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2021, multiple OREL presentations
• 07-05 Neuromatch Academy: Computational Neuroscience and Deep Learning courses - OREL members participate, and congratulations Krishna Katyal on being a DL TA!
• 05-17 Congratualtions Avery Lim and Jesse Parent on being awarded Research Grants via Effective Altruism Learning and Research (Artificial Intelligence)
• 05-15 “Allostasis Machines: a model for understanding internal states and technological environments” at ACM CHI 2021 Workshop on Emergent Interaction
• 04-10 “Cognition Futures & FrontierMap”, Research Symposium at Princeton Envision 2021 by OREL’s Cognition Futures team
• 04-09 “Challenges and Opportunities in Integrating Critical Voices in AI Ethics: Towards a Unified Ethical Framework for AI”, ACM’s New York Celebration of Women in Computing 2021, by OREL’s Society Ethics Tech team
• 03-24 International Workshop on Embodied Intelligence: Workshop Flash Talks and Interview for IEEE Embodied Intelligence podcast: Bradly Alicea, Stefan Dvoretskii, and Jesse Parent
• 03-21 “Periodicity in the Embryo” accepted for publication in Biosystems 204 in June

2020

• 12-11 Presentation by Bradly Alicea and Moderator Jesse Parent in “Observer-Dependent Models” talk at Philosopher’s Web Café
• 12-06 OREL members attending NeurIPS 2020 and MAIN2020
• 10-01 Jesse Parent to lead “Cognition Futures” research team within OREL
• 08-11 OREL members attend MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course 2020
• 07-31 OREL members attend Neuormatch Academy, Bradly Alicea serves as Projects Mentor.
• 07-15 Jesse Parent starts as Lab Manager for Orthogonal Research & Education Lab!