Seminars

Instructions

1. Check the internal calendar for a free seminar slot. If the seminar is not at the booked time of Tueday noon, you have to call or email Sharyn [510-643-4971, climons@berkeley.edu] to book a room. You have to do this as early as possible or she will be pissed. It is not easy for them to find rooms. The 3 rooms they can get are 5101 Tolman, the Beech Room (3rd floor Tolman), and the Barker seminar room (no more than 20 people...). They can also book the LSA large seminar room through MCB if given enough warning.
2. Make a note on this page in the Tentative Speakers section that you are going to invite a speaker. Please include your name and email as host in case somebody wants to contact you.
3. Invite a speaker.
4. As soon as the speaker confirms, put the information in the Confirmed Speakers section.
5. Put the date into the internal calendar
6. Notify kilian [1] that we have a confirmed speaker so that I can update the web page. Please include title and abstract.
7. Notify Sharyn [2] about the seminar date.

--Kilian 21:48, 4 November 2005 (PST)

Tentative Speakers

Jan 23 or Jan 30, 2007

• Speaker: Giuseppe Vitiello
• Affiliation: Department of Physics “E.R.Caianiello”, Salerno University, I-84100 Salerno, Italy and INFN, Gruppo Collegato, Salerno
• Host: Fritz
• Title: Relations between many-body physics and nonlinear brain dynamics

In a recent paper [1] it has been proposed a many-body model of nonlinear brain dynamics based on the thesis that mammalian neocortex supports dynamics sufficiently similar to the one of cooperative domains, such as cooperative domains in spin glasses, ensembles of phonons in crystals, coherent photons in lasers, condensation of vapors in crystal formation, etc., to warrant exploration of neurophysiological data and models in terms well-known by physicists. Our approach is evolving from the quantum field theory model proposed in 1967 [2] by Umezawa and Ricciardi where the mechanism of spontaneous breakdown of symmetry was proposed to be the basic mechanism originating brain functions such as memory recording and recall. By considering the fact that brains are open, dissipative systems that consume free energy in creating large-scale behaviorally related spatiotemporal patterns, we extend the Umezawa-Ricciardi model to dissipative dynamics, thus relating microscopic many-body dynamics to Prigogine's nonequilibrium thermodynamics and Haken's synergetics. Much attention is devoted in our model to the connection between specific features of the many-body dynamics, characteristic of the theory of quantum fields, and the rich phenomenology of neurophysiological data. We compare and contrast ECoG pattern formation in neocortex in terms of phase transitions in classical physics and spontaneous breaking of symmetry in quantum physics. A novel perspective in brain dynamics seems to emerge, unifying brain studies and condensed matter physics.

[1] Freeman WJ, Vitiello G (2006) Nonlinear brain dynamics as macroscopic manifestation of underlying many-body field dynamics. Physics of Life Reviews 3: 93-118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2006.02.001, http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/1515, http://arxiv.org/q-bio.OT/0511037

[2] Ricciardi L M, Umezawa H(1967) Brain physics and many-body problems. Kibernetik 4: 44-48*.

March 6

• Speaker: Pietro Perona
• Affiliation: Caltech
• Host: Bruno
• Title: TBA

March 13, 2007

• Speaker: Chris Wiggins
• Affiliation: Columbia University, NY
• Host: Tony
• Title: TBA

Confirmed Speakers

January 9, 2007

• Speaker: Boris Gutkin
• Affiliation: ENS, Paris
• Host: Fritz
• Title: Spike Generation Dynamics, Their Modulation and the Consequences for Network Behavior

February 20, 2007

• Speaker: Yair Weiss
• Affiliation: Israel
• Host: Tony
• Title: Something on "Fields of Experts"

May 15, 2007

• Speaker: Ray Guillery
• Affiliation: University of Madisson, WI
• Host: Fritz
• Title: Thalamus and Sensorimotor Aspects of Perception

Previous Seminars

Dec 5

• Speaker: Tanya Baker
• Affiliation: U Chicago
• Host: Kilian
• Title: What Forest Fires Tell Us About the Brain

December 1, 2006 1.30pm

• Informal visit: Nancy Kopell
• Affiliation: Boston University
• Host: Fritz
• Title: No talk: Informal visit in the afternoon

Nov 28

• Speaker: Thomas Dean
• Host: Bruno
• Affiliation: Brown University/Google
• Title: TBA

Nov 21

• Speaker: Urs Koster
• Host: Bruno
• Affiliation: University of Helsinki
• Title: Towards Multi-Layer Processing of Natural Images

Nov 14

• Speaker: Andrew D. Straw
• Affiliation: Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology
• Host: Kilian
• Title: Closed-Loop, Visually-Based Flight Regulation in a Model Fruit Fly

Nov 7

• Speaker: Mitya Chklovskii
• Host: Bruno
• Title: What determines the shape of neuronal arbors?

Oct 31

• Speaker: Matthias Kaschube
• Host: Kilian
• Title: A mathematical constant in the design of the visual cortex

Oct 3

• Speaker: Jay McClelland
• Affiliation: Mind, Brain & Computation/MBC, Psychology Department, Stanford
• Host: Evan
• Title: Graded Constraints in English Word Forms (video)

Sept 25

• Speaker: Peter Latham
• Affiliation: Gatsby Unit, UCL
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Requiem for the spike (video)

Sept 19

• Speaker: Jerry Feldman
• Affiliation: ICSI/UC Berkeley
• Host: Bruno
• Title: From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science (video)

Sept 5

• Speaker: Tom Griffiths
• Affiliation: Cogsci/UC Berkeley
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Natural Statistics and Human Cognition (video)

Aug 1

• Speaker: Carol Whitney
• Affiliation: U Maryland
• Host: Bruno
• Title: What can Visual Word Recognition Tell us about Visual Object Recognition? (video)

July 18

• Speaker: Evan Smith
• Affiliation: Redwood Center/Stanford
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Efficient auditory coding

June 20

• Speaker: Vincent Bonin
• Affiliation: Smith Kettlewell Institute
• Host: Thomas
• Title:

June 15

• Speaker: Philip Low
• Affiliation: Salk Institute
• Host: Tony
• Title: A New Way To Look At Sleep

May 2

• Speaker: Dileep George
• Affiliation: Numenta
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Hierarchical, cortical memory architecture for pattern recognition

April 18

• Speaker: Risto Miikkulainen
• Affiliation: The University of Texas at Austin
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Computational maps in the visual cortex (video)

April 11

• Speaker: Charles Anderson
• Affiliation: Washington University School of Medicine
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Population Coding in V1 (video)

April 10

• Speaker: Charles Anderson
• Affiliation: Washington University School of Medicine
• Host: Bruno
• Title: A Comparison of Neurobiological and Digital Computation (video)

April 4

• Speaker: Odelia Schwartz
• Affiliation: The Salk Institute
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Natural images and cortical representation

March 21

• Speaker: Mark Schnitzer
• Affiliation: Stanford University
• Host: Amir
• Title: In vivo microendoscopy and computational modeling studies of mammalian brain circuits

March 15

• Speaker: Mate Lengyel
• Affiliation: Gatsby Unit/UCL London
• Host: fritz
• Title: Bayesian model learning in human visual perception (video)

March 14

• Speaker: Mate Lengyel
• Affiliation: Gatsby Unit/UCL London
• Host: fritz
• Title: Firing rates and phases in the hippocampus: what are they good for? (video)

March 7

• Speaker: Michael Wu
• Affiliation: Gallant lab/UC Berkeley
• Host: Bruno
• Title: A Unified Framework for Receptive Field Estimation

February 28

• Speaker: Dario Ringach
• Affiliation: UCLA
• Host: thomas
• Title: Population dynamics in primary visual cortex

February 21

• Speaker: Gerard Rinkus
• Affiliation: Brandeis University
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Hierarchical Sparse Distributed Representations of Sequence Recall and Recognition (video)

February 14

• Speaker: Jack Cowan
• Affiliation: U Chicago
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Spontaneous pattern formation in large scale brain activity: what visual migraines and hallucinations tell us about the brain (video)

February 7

• Speaker: Christian Wehrhahn
• Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany
• Host: Tony
• Title: Seeing blindsight: motion at isoluminance?

January 23 (Monday)

• Speaker: Read Montague
• Affiliation: Baylor College of Medicine
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Abstract plans and reward signals in a multi-round trust game

January 17

• Speaker: Erhardt Barth
• Affiliation: Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatics, Luebeck, Germany
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Guiding eye movements for better communication (video)

January 3

• Speaker: Dan Butts
• Affiliation: Harvard University
• Host: Thomas
• Title: "Temporal hyperacuity": visual neuron function at millisecond time resolution

December 13, 2005

• Speaker: Paul Rhodes
• Affiliation: Stanford University
• Title: Simulations of a thalamocortical column with compartment model cells and dynamic synapses (video)

December 6, 2005

• Speaker: Special debate between Walter J. Freeman and Robert Hecht-Nielsen
• Affiliation: University of California at Berkeley (Walter). University of California at San Diego (Robert)
• Title: Waves or words in neocortex
• Video: Walter, Robert

November 29, 2005

• Speaker: Stanley Klein
• Affiliation: School of Optometry, UC Berkeley
• Title: Limits of Vision and psychophysical methods (video)

November 22, 2005

• Speaker: Scott Makeig
• Affiliation: Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computation, UCSD
• Title: Viewing event-related brain dynamics from the top down