How do we systematically decode, encode, and transform data stored in the activity of a population of neurons? If we know what processing we want done, how do we design a network to do it effectively? Can we build a compiler to implement a program on a neural machine?
Like for any machine, we will add a hardware abstraction layer between our data processing and the hardware. This approach will allow us to focus on the data that we are encoding, and the transformation applied to that data.