Let’s introduce to our audience Hon Weng Chong! Who are you? If you had to describe yourself in 1 sentence, what would you say?

I am the founder and CEO of Cortical Labs. I was previously the CTO and founder of a medtech company making Internet-connected medical devices called CliniCloud. Before CliniCloud, I was a medical doctor doing my residency in Emergency Medicine. I am also a software developer and have worked on apps and machine learning research.  In 1 sentence - I am a medical doctor and serial entrepreneur now working at the intersection of biology and computing. 

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What are the most 

A- Fascinating research 

B- Impactful research 

C- Fun and whimsical research          

You are leading these days?

A: Understanding what makes neurons in a petri dish learn how to play a video game

B: Understanding what happens to diseased neurons when they try to learn to play video games and what happens when you treat the neurons for the disease.

C: Understanding what happens to neurons when they get drunk while playing video games.    

Nowadays we hear all the time about cloud computing, quantum computing, neuromorphic computing…but what on Earth is biological computing?

Biological computing attempts to use biology as a novel material for computation. Just as silicon transistors are used to power our computers, biological computing attempts to use carbon based living cells such as neurons as an alternative to the transistor. 

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Chips, chips, chips…In the age of AI we hear this word everywhere…but how is it possible to put live neurons into chips?  

Yes, you can grow neurons into chips by using a compound such as laminin which allows the neurons to adhere to the surface of the chip. These chips are specialized and are usually embedded inside a petri dish well and submerged in a cell culture media. Biological neurons on chips allow us to explore intelligence in what is known as “online learning” where there is no distinction between the training and inference phase common in Machine Learning.

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AI…AI…AI…is AI doing anything useful in your field?

I guess they help us write better grants and come up with visual abstracts, but other than that, no. A lot of our work still requires a lot of intellectual capacity to think and analyze data. 

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If you could design an experiment without any limitations of time or money… what would it be? 

A large-scale multicenter trial where we could grow hIPSC neural networks from donors who would be subjected to the administration of the same drugs as their in-vitro neurons. This is to show a strong correlation of the administration of drugs, their efficacy, and cognitive side-effects through the use of our Dishbrain system.

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If you could have a superhero power. What would it be?

Luck

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Mystery dinner party…Dead or Alive, who would be 3 guests you would invite to your dinner party?

Jesus, Robin Williams, Sigmund Freud.

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If you could clone a person from the past with the same intellectual characteristics, who would that be?

Alan Turing