Xuan Choo
Senior Research Scientist at Applied Brain Research
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolXuan Choo is a Senior Research Scientist and co-founder at Applied Brain Research with 16 years of experience bridging theoretical neuroscience and practical neuromorphic computation. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Waterloo and leads work on modeling general cognition—concept generalization, integrated perception-decision-action pipelines, and memory formation—aimed at building systems that mirror complex brain functions. At ABR he combines research leadership with hands-on software and test engineering, including notable contributions to the prominent open-source Nengo library where he improved testing coverage for large-scale brain models. His background spans academia and industry roles in IT management and defense, giving him rare operational perspective on deploying cognitive models in real systems. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic scientist who translates neuroscience hypotheses into robust, testable software and hardware strategies for efficient, embodied computation.
16 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Undergraduate, Computer Engineering, Undergraduate, Computer Engineering at The University of British ColumbiaDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (7)
neural-network10
unit-testing10
pytest10
python10
ng10
test-automation10
neuroscience8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
nengo/nengo
Apr 2013 - Jun 2022
A Python library for creating and simulating large-scale brain models
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:45 commits, 10 PRs, 56 pushes in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Xuan primarily contributed to the testing framework and test code for the Nengo library. They refactored existing test code, created new test classes for core objects like Model, Network, and Ensemble, and added advanced testing examples. The user also updated example scripts to conform to the repository's standards and refactored the existing test suite. The contributions focused on expanding the testing coverage and enhancing the quality of the Nengo library.
brainpython-libraryneurosciencepythondeep-learning
nengo/nengo-fpga
Jul 2018 - Feb 2022
Nengo extension to connect to FPGAs
Contributions:2 releases, 8 reviews, 54 commits in 3 years 7 months
pythonfpgaslatticenengoneuromorphic
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