Education

California Institute of Technology
Ph.D., Social and Decision Neuroscience
2021–2026
Advisor: John O'Doherty

University of Massachusetts Amherst
Master of Science in Computer Science
2018–2020

Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering
Master of Technology in Communication Engineering
2011–2016

Journals

“Asymmetric weights and retrieval practice in an autoassociative neural network model of paired-associate learning.” Sneha Aenugu and David Huber. In Neural Computation 2021.

Conference Proceedings

“Retrospective value bias in setting temporally extended goals in humans.” Sneha Aenugu and John P. O'Doherty. In Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience 2023.

“ Lexicase selection in learning classifier systems.” Sneha Aenugu and Lee Spector,. In Proceedings of The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (Oral Presentation) 2019.

“Reinforcement learning with a network of spiking agents.” Sneha Aenugu, Abhishek Sharma, Sasikiran Yelamarthy, Hananel Hazan, Philip Thomas, Robert Kozma. In NeurIPS Workshop on Real Neurons and Hidden Units 2019.

“A memory enhanced LSTM for modeling complex temporal dependencies.” Sneha Aenugu. In NeurIPS Workshop on Context and Compositionality in Biological and Artificial Neural Systems 2019.

Conference Abstracts

“Momentum drives temporally-extended goal persistence in humans.” Sneha Aenugu and John P. O'Doherty. In MURI - 2nd Workshop on Neuro-Glial Computation, St. Louis 2023.

“Modeling frustration-induced decision-making through reinforcement learning.” Sneha Aenugu, Bowen. J. Fung, Dean Mobbs. In Lake Arrowhead Conference on Neurobiology of Reward and Decision Making, 2022.

“Learning complex action representations for goal-directed tasks through neuromodulation of Hebbian plasticity.” Sneha Aenugu, Abhishek Sharma, Sasikiran Yelamarthy, Hananel Hazan, Philip Thomas, Robert Kozma. In Society for Neuroscience (SFN), Chicago 2019.

“Associative symmetry redux: A behavioral and modeling reanalysis of paired-associate learning.” Sneha Aenugu, Anushree Mehta, David Huber. In Arthur. M. Sackler Colloquium on Brain Produces Mind by Modeling, 2019 .

“Cell segmentation in AAV tracer images of a mouse brain.” Sneha Aenugu, Daniel Ferrante, Partha Mitra. In Workshop on Machine Intelligence and Brain Research, IIT Madras 2016 .

Technical Reports

“Perturbation-based exploration methods in deep reinforcement learning.” Sneha Aenugu. In arxiv 2020 .

Patents

US11314209: “Detection of driving actions that mitigate risk.” Michael Campos, Venkata Sreekanta Reddy Annapureddy, Vikram Gupta, Hisham Rahman, Sneha Aenugu, Priyam Bakliwal, Alexander Thomas, Adam David Kahn, David Jonathan Julian, Sandeep Pandya, Avneesh Agrawal. Filed .

Invited Talks

January 13, 2023: “Neural underpinnings of narrative improvisation.” Chen Graduate Innovator Symposium.

February 5, 2021: “Reinforcement learning with a network of spiking agents.” UCSD Computation Group mini-symposium.

January 27, 2021: “Biologically plausible credit assignment in a network of neurons.” UCL Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit.

Contributed Talks

July 14, 2019: “Lexicase selection in learning classifier systems.” Proceedings of The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2019.

Professional Experience

Graduate Research Assistant
California Institute of Technology
2022–

Data Scientist
Enolink Technologies
2020–2021

Research Engineer
Netradyne Inc
2016–2018

Honors

Teaching

California Institute of Technology:

University of Massachusetts Amherst:

Indian Institute of Technology Madras:

Service

Organizer, Caltech Brain Imaging Center (CBIC) seminar series (2022 – 2023 )

Outreach, City of STEM, Los Angeles (2022)

Volunteer, Make A Difference Foundation (2016 – 2017)

Public Policy Research Intern, Rakshak Foundation (2014)

Correspondent, The Fifth Estate – IIT Madras Newsletter (2013 – 2014)

Placement Coordinator, IIT Madras Placement Cell (2013 – 2014)