Researcher profile

Barak A. Pearlmutter

Barak A. Pearlmutter contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

OSSMM: An Open-Source Sleep Monitor and Modulator

We present the Open-Source Sleep Monitor and Modulator (OSSMM), an open-source hardware and software platform for accessible sleep research. The OSSMM comprises a small wearable headband built from 3D prints and affordable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components at a material cost under 40 euros, supported by a companion Android application. The system requires no conductive gels, disposable electrodes, or specialized equipment, and captures multiple biosignals movement, pulse, electrooculography (EOG), and putative electroencephalography (EEG) with wireless connectivity for data storage and potential sleep modulation capability via an onboard vibration motor. A proof-of-concept single-participant evaluation across 15 nights demonstrated that the captured biosignals support four-stage sleep classification (Wake, Light Sleep, Deep Sleep, REM) using conventional machine learning methods, with the best-performing model achieving a Macro F1-score of 0.770 and accuracy of 0.776 against a validated non-contact sleep monitor ($κ$=0.63 with PSG). Two technical findings are of particular note. First, inexpensive, reusable conductive thermoplastic polyurethane (CTPU) electrodes from commercial fitness chest straps captured a differential signal whose spectral properties in canonical EEG frequency bands, including signatures consistent with sleep spindles, are the principal features driving classification. Second, this signal is obtained from just two frontal electrodes without a dedicated ground reference, suggesting that practical sleep staging is achievable with simpler configurations than typically employed. All hardware designs, software, and build instructions are openly available to support replication and modification by the research community.

preprint2022arXiv

ECG synthesis with Neural ODE and GAN models

Continuous medical time series data such as ECG is one of the most complex time series due to its dynamic and high dimensional characteristics. In addition, due to its sensitive nature, privacy concerns and legal restrictions, it is often even complex to use actual data for different medical research. As a result, generating continuous medical time series is a very critical research area. Several research works already showed that the ability of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the case of continuous medical time series generation is promising. Most medical data generation works, such as ECG synthesis, are mainly driven by the GAN model and its variation. On the other hand, Some recent work on Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (Neural ODE) demonstrates its strength against informative missingness, high dimension as well as dynamic nature of continuous time series. Instead of considering continuous-time series as a discrete-time sequence, Neural ODE can train continuous time series in real-time continuously. In this work, we used Neural ODE based model to generate synthetic sine waves and synthetic ECG. We introduced a new technique to design the generative adversarial network with Neural ODE based Generator and Discriminator. We developed three new models to synthesise continuous medical data. Different evaluation metrics are then used to quantitatively assess the quality of generated synthetic data for real-world applications and data analysis. Another goal of this work is to combine the strength of GAN and Neural ODE to generate synthetic continuous medical time series data such as ECG. We also evaluated both the GAN model and the Neural ODE model to understand the comparative efficiency of models from the GAN and Neural ODE family in medical data synthesis.

preprint2022arXiv

Gradients without Backpropagation

Using backpropagation to compute gradients of objective functions for optimization has remained a mainstay of machine learning. Backpropagation, or reverse-mode differentiation, is a special case within the general family of automatic differentiation algorithms that also includes the forward mode. We present a method to compute gradients based solely on the directional derivative that one can compute exactly and efficiently via the forward mode. We call this formulation the forward gradient, an unbiased estimate of the gradient that can be evaluated in a single forward run of the function, entirely eliminating the need for backpropagation in gradient descent. We demonstrate forward gradient descent in a range of problems, showing substantial savings in computation and enabling training up to twice as fast in some cases.

preprint2020arXiv

Neural ODEs for Informative Missingness in Multivariate Time Series

Informative missingness is unavoidable in the digital processing of continuous time series, where the value for one or more observations at different time points are missing. Such missing observations are one of the major limitations of time series processing using deep learning. Practical applications, e.g., sensor data, healthcare, weather, generates data that is in truth continuous in time, and informative missingness is a common phenomenon in these datasets. These datasets often consist of multiple variables, and often there are missing values for one or many of these variables. This characteristic makes time series prediction more challenging, and the impact of missing input observations on the accuracy of the final output can be significant. A recent novel deep learning model called GRU-D is one early attempt to address informative missingness in time series data. On the other hand, a new family of neural networks called Neural ODEs (Ordinary Differential Equations) are natural and efficient for processing time series data which is continuous in time. In this paper, a deep learning model is proposed that leverages the effective imputation of GRU-D, and the temporal continuity of Neural ODEs. A time series classification task performed on the PhysioNet dataset demonstrates the performance of this architecture.

preprint2020arXiv

Neural Ordinary Differential Equation based Recurrent Neural Network Model

Neural differential equations are a promising new member in the neural network family. They show the potential of differential equations for time series data analysis. In this paper, the strength of the ordinary differential equation (ODE) is explored with a new extension. The main goal of this work is to answer the following questions: (i)~can ODE be used to redefine the existing neural network model? (ii)~can Neural ODEs solve the irregular sampling rate challenge of existing neural network models for a continuous time series, i.e., length and dynamic nature, (iii)~how to reduce the training and evaluation time of existing Neural ODE systems? This work leverages the mathematical foundation of ODEs to redesign traditional RNNs such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). The main contribution of this paper is to illustrate the design of two new ODE-based RNN models (GRU-ODE model and LSTM-ODE) which can compute the hidden state and cell state at any point of time using an ODE solver. These models reduce the computation overhead of hidden state and cell state by a vast amount. The performance evaluation of these two new models for learning continuous time series with irregular sampling rate is then demonstrated. Experiments show that these new ODE based RNN models require less training time than Latent ODEs and conventional Neural ODEs. They can achieve higher accuracy quickly, and the design of the neural network is simpler than, previous neural ODE systems.