Part-time Neuroscientist & Entrepreneur. Full-time Explorer.

Welcome to the website of Dr Gareth Roberts.

My Current Projects download my formal resume

This Site is Not About My Exploring

But rather a collection of my entrepreneurial projects, academic research and various skills I've accumulated over the years.

I know you were excited for the explorer pics so here's a little teaser.

Gallery of My Exploring

What I'm Working On Outside Academia

Making Websites Faster

Optimising the speed of websites through headless website architectures. This involves separating the front visible component of the website from the back-end where the information is stored. Modern javascript frameworks such as React, Next, and Nuxt have enabled new techniques in accelerating how fast a page is delivered to a user.

The cloud and its "edge", amongst the enormous internet infrastructure now present in the world, allows for intelligent caching of website contents so that it is closest to the user. Serverless technology, that is business logic applied at different points of the cloud's edge can lead to enormous speed benefits to the user. The bottleneck is no longer on due to a high cost physical server, with nearly all cloud providers able to perform logical operations in less than 50 ms.

eCommerce Optimisation

Despite ecommerce growing year-on-year, is it a case of quantity over quality? Google has shown that page speed is one of the most critical factors in whether a user will follow through with a purchase. Although this is quite common knowledge, many large companies have painfully slow websites or make changes to the site that are unlikely to lead to large improvements in page speed.

Modern web development frameworks have the capability of huge reductions in how long it takes a website to load. These frameworks allow for the site to be statically compiled, with all assets cached on the cloud and any dynamic components of the website being performed by serverless logic. This allows for the website to "stay ahead" of the user and reduce any wait time for the user.

Geospatial Analysis

There are now 1000s of satellites orbiting the Earth. Depending on their characteristics and altitude, it is now possible to obtain extremely high visual resolution satellite imagery in a matter of days, and lower quality images in a matter of hours. These characteristics are predominately determined by the height at which the satellite is orbiting the Earth. It is also possible to hover in the same location, something referred to as geosynchronous orbit, which allows for continuous monitoring of a particular location.

With AWS and Azure now providing a large variety of services related to both the control, processing and analysis of Satellite data, location intelligence can have a major implications on areas such as real estate, disaster recovery, insurance, defence, asset monitoring and environmental changes.

e-commerce side hustle

Bloomspace

My first serious eCommerce effort, Bloomspace started with the premise of selling high quality plants that seemed too large to ship around Australia. Over the last three years, we've successfully shipped 1000s of plants around the country and have over 300+ 5-star reviews.

Covid placed many restrictions on key members of the team in Sydney during the lockdown period and now the business is predominately focused on B2B customers or customised large orders.

To the left is a screen snap of Bloomspace as a highly optimised single app version of the website (Vercel's Next.js Commerce starter).

Visit Bloomspace App as Headless App Visit Main Bloomspace Site

Source localisation pty ltd

Using Big Data and Deep Learning AI to Improve the Detection of Mineral Deposits

As valuable as visiting remote locations and performing analysis on surface level geology is it is both difficult and expensive to get to these remote regions and perform surface-level and drill core analysis.

Advances in Cloud Computing & High-Resolution Satellite Imagery

Satellites can give insights into light reflectance, gravitational pull and underground geology through technologies such as Lidar and light infrared spectroscopy.

When combined with historical geological mapping and surface-level analysis, the probabilities of finding particular mineral deposits is increased.

Learn more about Source Localisation Pty Ltd

Learn more here...

My Academic Interests

Capacity limits of attention and working memory

Since the early 1900s, Psychologists have realised that people of all different ages and levels of development have difficulty holding multiple things in mind at the same time and paying attention to multiple objects in the face of distraction. I use neuroimaging techniques such as EEG, fMRI and fNIRS to probe neuronal activity under differing levels of cognitive load. A particular focus of mine is on the function of frontopolar cortex or Brodmann Area 10, a large section of the prefrontal cortex that continues to frustrate neuroscientists in defining its function.

Brain activity associated with making a single decision

For a considerable amount of time, psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists were of the mindset that individual trials mostly consisted of noise, and that to reveal the true neural signature of an event, a large number of individual trials needed to be obtained and averaged together. This averaging procedure was thought to reveal the true signal and lessen any irrelevant noise. However, scientists (myself included) have begun to examine the neural dynamics of single trials and their relationship with measurable behaviour (e.g., reaction time). How could a neural event occur at 600 ms, when majority of the trials were either slower or faster than this duration?

Neuroimaging Methodology & Brain Function

Perhaps the most obvious of all my academic interests is in understanding the mechanisms that underly information processing in the human brain. To this degree, I have been involved in many different neuroimaging techniques, including the acquisition of electroencephalography (EEG), structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (sfMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), functional transcranial doppler sonography (fTDS), transcranial magetic stimulation (TMS) data and the analysis of data recorded from these techniques.

My Academic Work

Here is a collection of my research conducted at the University of Western Australia, Murdoch University, and the University of Sydney.

The image on the right reflects brain connectivity changes in the resting state EEG of healthy participants administered a high-dose of dexamphetamine compared to placebo, and when their eyes were open and closed.

Google Scholar Profile Research Gate Academia.edu Publons Learn more

Selected Publications

In this paper we investigated the fundamental processes that underly how humans convert verbal instructions into a mental representation capable of guiding behaviour at a novel task. Using time-frequency analysis of EEG data collected, we show that power changes in the theta (4-8 Hz) and beta (13-30) bands are strongly affected by complexity of the verbal instructions.

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In this paper, we investigated the effects of high-dose dexamphetamine in healthy individuals as a test of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia. This paper made several important methodological advances in psychopharmacological research including the comparison of a large number of connectivity and graph theory metrics applied to EEG data at both the sensor and source level.

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In this paper, we introduce a novel method for the grouping of independent components from different participants' EEG activity. In this context, we were investigating the development of response conflict processes that occurs between 7 and 9 years of age and is linked to developmental processes of the prefrontal cortex.

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projects & work experience

A Collection of my Resumes for Data Science, Web Development & Academia

Data Scientist Resume Academic Resume Copies of Scientific Papers Code Repository

Part-time Neuroscientist & Entrepreneur. Full-time Explorer.

This Site is Not About My Exploring

Gallery of My Exploring