Selfhood

Aslan was born in an Azerbaijani family in Tehran. His familial background is mostly populated by engineers and entrepreneurs. His upbringing can be considered liberal in a relatively conservative society with many interesting discussions around social, political, and economical issues. His childhood memory is full of outdoors, football, and regular school studies. However, there is also a cultural element around his ethnicity, Azerbaijani, in a society which does not support multicultural or bilingual education. Later, he was introduced to the benefits of multicultural society and also more creative educational systems.

His scientific interest triggered when he entered to Allameh Helli (NODET). During those priceless seven years for intermediate and high schools, in a competitive environment, he studied many things, from physics and philosophy to sociology and literature. His studies in physics finally brought him a bronze medal in the National Olympiad Physics of Iran. Following the traditional path in his family, he entered to the University of Tehran to study mechanical engineering where he performed mostly computational research in fluid mechanics. During this time, his curiosity led him to discover the works of Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures and far-from-equilibrium systems. That was a turning point in his scientific career motivated him to study more living or non-living complex self-organizing systems.

Although Aslan never practiced actively any kinds of art, he believes he has developed a particular taste for novels and movies since high school period. He has an eclectic list of favorite novelists: from Latin America, he has read many fictions by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. From the United States, he has enjoyed reading William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, and Richard Brautigan. From Europe, he has enjoyed reading books by Franz Kafka, Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco. Also, he has enjoyed novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Orhan Pamuk, and Haruki Murakami. For movies, again he enjoys works by specific directors. He appreciates European cinemas such as works by Ingmar Bergman (e.g. "Persona"), Luis Bunuel, Theo Angelopoulos (e.g. "The weeping meadow"), Emir Kusturica (e.g. "Underground"), Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach, Dardenne brothers, and Aki Kaurismaki (e.g. "The man without a past"). From Russian cinemas, he likes Andrei Tarkovsky (e.g. "Nostalgia") and Andrey Zvyagintsev. From Turkey, he enjoys all movies by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (e.g. "Once upon a time in Anatolia"). From Japan, he likes Akira Kurosawa's movies (e.g. "Rashomon") and Yasujirō Ozu (e.g. "Tokyo story"). Finally, from the United States, he likes movies by Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese. However, he thinks that probably the best movie director of all times is Abbas Kiarostami from Iran (e.g. "Close-up").

After undergraduate studies, he went to the University of Michigan to obtain a master degree in mechanical engineering. But his passion was somewhere else; he started to self-educate himself in biophysics by reading relevant seminal works such as Erwin Schrodinger's "What Is Life?" and Alan Turing's "The Chemical Bases of Morphogenesis". During this time, he developed a keen interest in biological collective phenomena, from multi-molecular and multi-cellular cooperation to animal collective movement and human collective decision-making.  After obtaining a master degree, he wanted to taste experimental research in biophysics and Alan Hunt provided him the opportunity to work with the biophysical devices in his lab such as optical tweezers. Alan was exceptional academician with entrepreneurship style of doing science and truly inspiring mentor. He was very fond of multidisciplinary sciences and Aslan was profoundly influenced by his wisdom, optimism, and humor. Aslan next moved farther in the biological direction to do experimental and computational research in the Kristen Verhey's lab. There, he enjoyed the collaborative atmosphere and he learned how to distinguish biologically relevant questions from more abstract concepts in biophysics. His colleagues and him published two articles, this and this, from the research in this lab. 

Afterward, he was introduced to the fascinating realm of neuroscience in the Dawen Cai's lab through the aesthetics of Brainbow images. There, he developed a deep appreciation toward neuroscience by developing an image processing toolbox for Brainbow images. Dawen's approach to science is also similar to Alan's influenced Aslan afterwards. Aslan could publish two articles, this and this, in collaboration with his colleagues in this lab. After coming back to Iran in 2014, he obtained an opportunity to perform research at the IPM's School of Cognitive Sciences. This was another competitive environment which pushed him to study with more depth neuroscientific literature. Here, he developed a change-point method for single-trial analysis of simultaneous EEG-fMRI which was published in this manuscript. After that, at the University of Tehran and under the supervision of Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh, he worked on a project related to the investigation of neural correlates of intelligence using individual resting-state fMRI. The works from this project were published in two articles, this and this. He believes that the work he performed here can be framed in the emerging field of cognitive computational neuroscience.

Beside reading regularly popular science books, from his familial background, he has been actively following social, political, and economical development in Iran and the middle-east. Influenced by Arab Spring and its aftermath impacts in the region, in 2016, he started to study deeply Iran's and middle-east cultures, societies, and political and economical institutions to compare them with the western counterparts. He was inspired by two outstanding political economy books by Homa Katouzian  and Daron Acemoglu which shed light on the the current circumstances in the region and the path toward better future.

Just before moving to Europe and to taste an entrepreneurship environment, his friends and Aslan decided to attend an entrepreneurship event for developing startup ideas in a well-known accelerator in Tehran. Their idea was about using behavioural sciences to motivate households to use less electricity. Their idea won the first prize in the event's competition. Influenced by his experience in this event, he decided to make efforts to invest more on his general skills such as data analysis and machine learning.

Then, he moved to Göttingen to start his next job as a data analyst in the European Neuroscience Institute. From the beginning, here, his emphasis was on learning modern machine learning techniques such as deep and probabilistic machine learning, possible ways of improving them, and their applications. In one of his projects, in collaboration with Caspar Schwiedrzik's lab, he has worked on a deep learning model of visual perceptual learning and the effects of task-irrelevant variable stimuli on the generalization performance of the deep neural network. For this project, he investigated generalization phenomenon in deep learning and its relation with dimensionality and compositionality of stimuli. Aslan's collaboration with Caspar Schwiedrzik's lab resulted in two articles, this and this. In another project, in collaboration with Jan Clemens' lab, he ported a probabilistic machine learning framework which combines Generalized Linear Model and Hidden Markov Model (GLM-HMM) from MATLAB to Python. This GLM-HMM model has been developed as a method to infer internal states of an animal based on sensory environment and produced behaviour. In another collaborative project with Jan Clemens' lab, he has used a self-supervised learning method - contrastive predictive coding - to enhance the generalizability of a learned representation in a deep neural network developed for sound processing of animal songs - deep song segmenter (dss).

What is he pursuing now? Since 2022, Aslan has cofounded three startups: in AutocurriculaLab, he uses artificial intelligence to simulate social phenomena; in Neuro-Inspired Vision, he borrows concepts from neuroscience to build robust artificial vision systems; and in LangTechAI, he develops open source tools based on large language models.