John Luoyu Zhou

Hello! I'm a PhD student in the Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program (NSIDP) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at UCLA, advised by Jonathan Kao. I received my BS in computer science from Columbia University, where I was advised by Liam Paninski in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

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Current Research

I am broadly interested in general-purpose agents who can acquire useful representations and skills without external supervision. My goal is to endow autonomous agents with an intrinsic sense of curiosity that drives them to explore and influence the world around them.

Reciprocal Reward Influence Encourages Cooperation From Self-Interested Agents

We introduce an intrinsic reciprocal reward that encourages an agent to reciprocate the influence of other agents’ actions on its own return, and show that this encourages cooperation from other self-interested agents in sequential social dilemmas.

Neuroscience Cloud Analysis As a Service

An open-source, drag-and-drop platform that uses cloud resources to run modern neuroscience data analyses.

Partitioning variability in animal behavioral videos using semi-supervised variational autoencoders

A semi-supervised framework that combines the output of supervised pose estimation algorithms with unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods to produce interpretable, low-dimensional representations of behavioral videos.

Previous Research

My previous work in other fields.

A Requirement of Protein Geranylgeranylation for Chemokine Receptor Signaling and Th17 Cell Function in an Animal Model of Multiple Sclerosis

We elucidate the critical role of protein geranylgeranylation in regulating T lymphocyte migration and function.

Writing

• A Full Dive, Knowing Neurons

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website