Ali Moeeny - علی معینی

This page is mostly out of date, come over to Google Plus .

You may ask why your page is so out of date!?
Because I am very busy with life and I am developing some cool apps for the iPad/iPhone (a couple of Mac apps are in the pipeline too)

NIH Events Journal Club PicTile i See You DisMat

Me

If you know me, you can follow me here (I mean right here) or here.
If you don't know me what are you doing here?! Go enjoy your life, there are lots of cool people out there, like here or here.
If you want to see my linkedin profile it's here.
And I am of course on FaceBook.
And with all the Buzz around Google Buzz I should say I have a Google Profile too, although I don't like Google to get into every cool thing that emerges in the world, specially they don't need to add everything into GMail! Everyday they are getting more and more like Microsoft!

By the way recently I have been TOO busy with life! I am getting better at it!

Just for the record I am kind of a Brain Scientist! Kind of, not the kind that you read about them in the books when you were younger, but one who is still trying to become one! Actually my life revolves around training monkeys to do very simple video games and then record the neural activity of their visual brains while they are playing the game!

If you are a scientist, I should say I am currently a research fellow at the National Eye Institute at the NIH.

I have been doing what I do here and here and now here

For the record I love the whole Stackexchange thing!

profile for Ali on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

Motahar

I married a fantastic girl some years ago, we stopped counting the years when it was just a few years, not that we don't enjoy our life, but because it sounds a bit like older than us when we say we have been married for 8 years now :)

Me in the paradise

Believe it or not, I used to live in the paradise!
We were two friends plus a few more comrades!
We didn't have money but we didn't care that much about money either, not that it is bad in any way to care about money, actually you should care about money if you don't already, but my point is we did what we did because we loved it and we believed that's the way to go for us.
We founded a small company called Rasanic and we started doing all sorts of cool stuff.
Later we realized that we were on the cutting edge of web technologies at the time and we did not live in silicon valley or New York and not even in Tehran, but in Isfahan of all places.
As some of you may know, Isfahan has a strange mixture of people with difference cultures, but the sociopolitical spirit of Isfahan at least at the time I was between 17-27 years old, was one of the most toxic, short sighted, narrow minded of all the Iran. At the time I didn't knew this and like many other residents of Isfahan I believed I live in an excellent place (and it is a nice city, but only if you don't work and have your money delivered to your door from thin air).
Anyway, the friend that was one of my best friends was Reza Jowshan, he was a fine guy, but not an ordinary fine guy, he was like many of us rather shy and introverted. One of the extraordinary features of him was that he had a mind that could handle engineering problems at the same time as artistic/creative problems.
We used to do "pair programming" [Wikipedia], we didn't know it will have a name but we found it most effective when we sat down at the same computer and one held the mouse (Reza) and one held the keyboard (Ali) and we worked like like %20-%50 of the time, specially when we were starting a new project.
We were doing OK (we didn't used to make any money to even compensate the money we needed to servers and equipment let alone paying ourselves or others who worked for/with us), ...
Until we finished med school and we needed to go to do our military service, I decided that it is not acceptable for me to waste two years of my life like that and at the time I thought a better option is to follow my dream of getting a PhD in Neuroscience (which later turned out to be one of my worst decisions in my whole life!) but Reza decided that he can find a place to do the service in a reasonable way.

More on this story later ... [needless to say I'd appreciate any comments, corrections, suggestions ..., you can find my email at the bottom of this page]

I've learned that ...

Things that I learned, usually the hard way:

Open Brain

I am also working on this open source project called "Open Brain". You can see a preview here. You can find it at github. It is currently for my own use. But my intention is to make it as flexible as possible for everyone to use. And by everyone I mean everyone who works with spike trains and neuronal data and .... As I am a visual learner I need to visualize things to understand them better and this is a theme in Open Brain as well. We'll see!

By the way as Open Brain is on github you are welcome to fork! and maybe we merge latter on or go our own ways! Actually currently I am mostly focused on what I need in my current experiments but eventually it would grow.

My Mind!

No! this is not a software (You wish?!). This is actually what's on MY mind.
I am fascinated by science (and by science I mean knowledge in general not pure "science") specifically human mind and brain is what I have been busy studying for most of my adult life! (I don't remember when I became and adult though)
Anyway, this story is not finished...

For now, you may want to have a look at my 140 character essays on Brain science here #nq stands for Neuroscience question.
I have started to post some of my louder thoughts to my blog.


TED

I am a TED language coordinator and TED translator. I translate into Farsi. You can find my TED translations here. You can find my TED profile here.

I got the chance to get to TEDActive 2010 (see some photos here). And did almost live twitting there, @alimoeeny. You can also find a list of TED talks that I like here


Books I've been reading

I've been reading:


Where I get energy from

Obviously I get my enrgy from many many sources, many of them too obvious to say here, but these are some of the more less obvious ones:


Music I listen to

I am a huge Last.fm fan. Almost all the music I listen to is being scrobbled there.


Movies I've been watching

This is a sparse list of movies that I enjoyed without any order:


TV shows I like!

This is a list of TV shows I enjoyed:


Things I can't believe I've done

I cannot tell you all of them!
Here are some that are less embarrassing or are embarrassing but are kind of useful for others to see and not to try!


People whom I admire and/or like!

I know, it is not an inclusive list, and obviously I don't include loved ones and friends and family here! So if you are not in the list, you are better off! Sure enough and I put them into different groups just to show that I admire them differently but don't ask me why or what or which! Don't pester me! You all have lists of people you like or dislike, it is just in your mind, mine is on the web! I don't have a list of people I dislike (it's too long a list ;-) )!


Games I've been playing

I mean games other than the life itself of course.


Rasanic

I co-founded Rasanic [a small computer company based in Isfahan, Iran] with my late friend Reza. [There is a lot to bo said here, but not now, maybe later]



My Weight (literally!)

For me (and I assume for many) knowing that (significant) others can monitor my weight is a very good incentive to stay in shape!




My gas efficiency!

Fuelly













































































Nothing down here! What are you looking for? send me an email. My address is alimoeeny@ I am sure you can guess which one I use (Gmail if you should know!)