Seminars

Instructions

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.
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.
Invite a speaker.
As soon as the speaker confirms, put the information in the Confirmed Speakers section.
Put the date into the internal calendar
Notify kilian [1] that we have a confirmed speaker so that I can update the web page. Please include title and abstract.
Notify Sharyn [2] about the seminar date.

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

Tentative Speakers

March 27 - (spring recess)

Confirmed Speakers

April 24

Speaker: Jeff Johnson
Affiliation: UC Davis
Host: Bruno
Title: What does EEG tell us about the timecourse of object recognition?

May 15, 2007

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

In many contemporary studies and textbooks perceptual processing is treated as a ‘pure sensory’ phenomenon, one that can be understood on the basis of pathways passing information from the sensory periphery to the cerebral cortex, for processing within the cortex and subsequent passage to motor centers or memory stores. However, many physiologists, psychologists and philosophers have recognized perceptual processing as closely dependent upon action (e.g. the ‘sensorimotor contingencies’ of O’Regan and Noë, 2001), although the anatomical nature of the functional links is generally left unresolved.

A survey of pathways that pass messages through the thalamus to the cerebral cortex (visual, tactile etc.) shows that these are not ‘pure sensory’ pathways. They are generally branching axons that convey messages through one branch to lower, motor centers and to the thalamus through the other. That is, since the two branches will be transmitting the same message, the thalamic relay receives information not only about sensory events, but also, concurrently, information about instructions that are on the way to motor centers. This dual information, about sensory events and motor instructions, is an implicit part of the message that the thalamus passes to cortex. The axonal branching patterns reveal an anatomical basis of sensorimotor contingencies, which cortical mechanisms are not likely to ignore even when experimental studies do not reveal them.

Reference: O’Regan JK and Noë, (2001) A sensorimotor approach to vision and visual consciousness. Behav. & Brain Sciences 24, 939-973)

Previous Seminars

April 17, 2007

Speaker: Steve Waydo
Affiliation: Control & Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology
Host: Bruno
Title: Explicit Object Representation by Sparse Neural Codes

April 10

Speaker: Andrew Ng
Affiliation: Stanford University
Host: Bruno
Title: Unsupervised discovery of structure for transfer learning

April 3

Speaker: Robert Miller
Affiliation: Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology, Otago University
Host: Fritz
Title: Axonal conduction time and human cerebral laterality

March 20, 2007

Speaker: Jeff Hawkins
Affiliation: Numenta
Host: Bruno
Title: Hierarchical Temporal Memory

March 13, 2007

Speaker: Chris Wiggins
Affiliation: Columbia University, NY
Host: Tony
Title: Optimal signal processing in small stochastic biochemical networks

March 6

Speaker: Pietro Perona
Affiliation: Caltech
Host: Bruno
Title: An exploration of visual recognition

March 1

Speaker: Hiroki Asari
Affiliation: CSL
Host: Fritz
Title: Sparse Representations for the Cocktail Party Problem
Abstract: A striking feature of many sensory processing problems is that there appear to be many more neurons engaged in the internal representations of the signal than in its transduction. For example, humans have about 30,000 cochlear neurons, but at least a thousand times as many neurons in the auditory cortex. Such apparently redundant internal representations have sometimes been proposed as necessary to overcome neuronal noise. We instead posit that they directly subserve computations of interest. Here we provide an example of how sparse overcomplete linear representations can directly solve difficult acoustic signal processing problems, using as an example monaural source separation using solely the cues provided by the differential filtering imposed on a source by its path from its origin to the cochlea (the head-related transfer function, or HRTF). In contrast to much previous work, the HRTF is used here to separate auditory streams rather than to localize them in space. The experimentally testable predictions that arise from this model--- including a novel method for estimating a neuron's optimal stimulus using data from a multi-neuron recording experiment---are generic, and apply to a wide range of sensory computations.

February 20, 2007

Speaker: Yair Weiss
Affiliation: Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Host: Tony
Title: What makes a good model of natural images?

February 13, 2007

Speaker: Tobi Delbruck
Affiliation: Inst of Neuroinformatics, UNI-ETH Zurich
Host: Bruno
Title: Building a high-performance event-based silicon retina leads to new ways to compute vision
URL: http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch

Jan 23, 2007

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

Jan 9, 2007

Speaker: Boris Gutkin
Affiliation: University of Paris
Host: Fritz
Title: TBA

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

Seminars

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