Shay Snyder
All experience
Research · 2026 — Present

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

George Mason University · Fairfax, VA

Spatial representation and memory under compute, memory, and energy constraints, with Prof. Maryam Parsa in the Parsa Research Laboratory.

Spatial RepresentationSpatial MemoryDistributed IntelligenceVector Symbolic Architectures

Current work

I work with Prof. Maryam Parsa in the Parsa Research Laboratory on spatial representation and memory for autonomous systems with limited compute, memory, and energy.

  • Extending VSA-based occupancy grid mapping from binary occupancy toward semantic mapping within the compute budget of a laptop CPU.
  • Deploying VSA-based spatial-memory algorithms onboard a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped, through a collaboration that began at the 2026 Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop; manuscript in preparation.
  • Developing collective spatial memory for multi-robot teams, with cooperative map-building over bandwidth-limited links by exchanging fixed-width vectors rather than map fragments.

The VSA-OGM project and its published paper describe the spatial-mapping approach I am extending in this role. The earlier SRMU paper explores relevance-gated updates for streaming hyperdimensional memories. Both papers predate the postdoctoral role.