Re: [gatsby-tnjc-discuss] Digest for gatsby-tnjc-discuss@googlegroups.com - 2 Messages in 1 Topic

[Ritwik Niyogi]

I forgot to ask about workshops--- did anyone go to the Information Sampling workshop? I was invited to speak-- but ran out of money (and Angelina Jolie passed on adopting me).

If you attended, what did you think ? Anything interesting ?

Many thanks

Ritwik

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 9:08 PM, <gatsby-tn...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

  Today's Topic Summary

Group: http://groups.google.com/group/gatsby-tnjc-discuss/topics

• [TNJC] Neuro Journal Club this week (14/3, 2pm, Friday) [2 Updates]

 [TNJC] Neuro Journal Club this week (14/3, 2pm, Friday)

Agnieszka Grabska Barwinska <agnieszka.gra...@gmail.com> Mar 14 12:15AM  

Dear All,
 
I'm sorry to miss another JC, looking forward to it moving back to Tuesdays..
 
Since I won't be there to talk about my impressions from Cosyne (great
snow on Sunday! ;)), I wrote down the talks/posters that made the
greatest impression on me.
 
Doris Tsao's talk on face processing system - it's been a while since
I last heard about FFA. Lots of progress made since then, very
impressive and convincing arguments for the (now six patches of ) area
to be specialised in coding for faces. Not very computational, but
still, I'd say, most interesting of the talks I've seen. If no one
covers it, I'll probably steal the topic for a tea talk next week.
 
Nachum Ulanovsky's talk on grid cells and place cells in bats - again,
nothing computational, but a strong evidence against theta-gamma
oscillations being of any relevance to coding of space by hippocampus
and the rest..
 
Neir Eshel gave an interesting account of (ventral tegmental area)
dopamine neurons responses in face of rewards and their predictions
(signalled by odours). They recorded both divisive effect of
prediction on the population of neurons, and "scaled" subtractive
inhibition on single neurons, where "scaling" was predicted by the
responsiveness of neurons to rewards (i.e. the more they fired to the
reward, the more would be subtracted from the activity, when the
reward could be predicted with 100% certainty).
 
My pick of the poster session was "An olfactory cocktail party -
Detection of single odorants within mixtures in rodents" (from V
Murthy's lab) - a title you might recognise from my own posters.
Finally, some experimental confirmation that we're not solving an
abstract task! ;)
 
Most memorable workshop sessions I've seen were by Peter L (you'll
probably hear about that one) and Jonathan Pillow (my other pick for
the tea talk, if no one else covers that one).
 
Looking forward to hearing back what you discussed,
 
a
 
 


 

Joana Soldado Magraner <j.soldado...@googlemail.com> Mar 14 08:47PM  

Hi all,
 
I am also sorry that I missed the discussion today, so I will briefly
comment on some of the talks I found interesting.
 
 
The thing that surprised me the most was the finding by Yates et al.
regarding the functional role of LIP in primate cortex. Surprisingly, LIP
inactivation during a decision-making task did not impair performance,
suggesting that LIP is not involved in the decision. Their results
conflicted with the well-established belief that LIP main task is to
integrate sensory evidence from area MT. The authors speculate that LIP may
be accumulating post-decisional signals or that it may be read out in a
very different manner than MT.
 
 
I was told that this talk was already mentioned during the discussion, so I
will comment on something else, this time about one of the workshops:
Altered Dynamics of Neural Circuit Activity in Brain Disorders.
 
The title of the talk was Neural dynamics in models of human focal
epilepsy, by T. Sejnowski. He started the talk pointing out that epileptic
patients are in fact a unique 'preparation'. He literally said: what better
than a human for a human?
He presented a model based on delay differential equations (DDEs). These
relate the derivative of a signal to the signal itself but shifted in time.
The equations can incorporate several delays and non-linearities. The goal
was to capture the underlying dynamics of EEG signals, coming from
different patients and brain areas. Even though there are many possible
combinations of delays and non-linearities, they could fit the data of 15
subjects and different brain areas using only 4 models. It would be
interesting to find whether there's actually a biophysical correspondence
to these delays and non-linear terms.
Finally, he announced that they are organizing a competition for seizure
prediction algorithms. They are generating a big data base with recordings
from many patients, which will be publicly available. Of course, there's
going to be a substantial prize for the winner, hoping that this will be
attractive enough to the machine learning community!
 
 
 
And yes, the Noise Correlation Workshop... that was fun indeed :P
 
 
 
Have a nice weekend!
 
 
 
 
Joana Soldado Magraner
 
 
2014-03-14 0:15 GMT+00:00 Agnieszka Grabska Barwinska <


 

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