Dr. James Bergstra holds a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience. His research interests include visual system models and learning algorithms, deep learning, Bayesian optimization, high performance computing, and music information retrieval. Previously he was a member of Professor David Cox’s Computer and Biological Vision Lab at Harvard University. He completed doctoral studies at the University of Montreal in July 2011 under the direction of Professor Yoshua Bengio with a dissertation on how to incorporate complex cells into deep learning models. As part of his doctoral work he co-developed Theano, a popular meta-programming system for Python that can target GPUs for high-performance computation.