Homework

Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
1st Class Assignment 1. First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why. The Tool: “Neuro-Visor”: A Real-Time Bio-Computational Monitoring & Visualization Interface for Cerebral Assembloids. Currently, brain organoids are becoming more complex. We are moving from simple clusters to “Assembloids”, where different regions (like the cortex and thalamus) are fused together. While this is great for studying diseases like Alzheimer’s, it risks creating neural networks that exhibit “unintentional sentience” or organized electrical activity similar to a developing human fetus. As a UI/UX designer and Python developer, this tool would be a software-hardware interface that plugs into Multi-Electrode Arrays (MEAs), which are the chips these organoids grow on. It uses Python-based signal processing (Spike sorting, Fourier transforms) to translate raw electrical “noise” into a visual “Ethical Heatmap.” Without a standardized way to “see” the complexity of an organoid’s thoughts, we are flying blind. We need a tool that tells a researcher exactly when an organoid has crossed an ethical “Red Line.”