About Me

Hi, I'm Jascha Achterberg, a Neuroscience and AI Researcher at Callosum & the University of Oxford.

Dan Akarca and I recently launched Callosum (www.callosum.com), where we build entirely new intelligent systems through co-evolving systems of chips and algorithms, backed by our partners at Plural and ARIA. Life has been hectic, some of the text on my website may be out of date, but my vision for what kind research and engineering efforts will lead us to better understand and build intelligent systems fundamentally remains the same as described below. I outline some longer form thoughts on what lead us to starting Callosum here.

As a Career Development Research Fellow (CDRF) of St John's College at the University of Oxford, I study how the brain's system-level architecture enables flexible cognition and how it can be translated into large-scale computing systems. My research investigates how the brain is organized—which specialized submodules it contains, what circuit patterns these submodules use, and how its connections and topology allow different regions to communicate and coordinate. With this understanding of how the brain's distributed architecture produces sophisticated cognition, I develop novel algorithms and design specialized computing circuits that implement these principles, working from theoretical models through to hardware system prototypes to understand which specific features bring which specific functional benefits.

The overall goal of this link between biological and artificial computing is to understand the general principles of intelligence in large-scale distributed computing systems. My work addresses both the need for more capable theoretical models that can capture the complexity of modern neuroscientific data and the opportunity to develop more efficient computing architectures by understanding how biological systems achieve intelligence at scale.

Before joining St John's College and the University of Oxford, I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge (at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and ironically also St John's College; an unnecessary trivia fact is that in Cambridge it is named after St John the Evangelist, in Oxford after St John the Baptist). I worked under the supervision of John Duncan and Matthew Botvinick, in collaboration with both Google DeepMind and Intel Labs. My research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

Get in touch!

Please get in touch if you are interested in my work in any way or form. I am excited to hear from researchers and students pursuing the same goals. If you work for a school or other organisation and would be interested in hearing more about my work and computational neuroscience in general, I would be delighted to help organise an outreach activity with you!

Feel free to reach out at [email protected] or contact me on Bluesky @achterbrain or Twitter @achterbrain.