[ExI] [Hplusroadmap] Fwd: [Comp-neuro] neuroinformatics congress: abstract submission deadline extended

[Bryan Bishop]

The key note speakers are good reasons to attend. Take a look:

Idan Segev
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Title: Where detailed brain models lead us?

Bio sketch: Idan Segev's research team utilizes computational tools
ranging from cable theory to compartmental modeling to statistical
methods and information theory to study how neurons, the elementary
microchips of the brain, compute and dynamically adapt to our
ever-changing environment. More recently, he has worked jointly with
several experimental groups worldwide in an endeavor to model in
detail the cortical column – a functional unit containing thousands of
intensely but very specifically connected networks of neurons. This
project also aims at developing automated methods for generating
models of the different electrical and morphological classes of
neurons found in the column. The ultimate goal is to unravel how local
fine variations within the cortical network underlie specific
computations (e.g., the orientation of a bar in the visual system) and
may give rise to certain brain diseases or to a healthy (and
"individual") brain. Idan Segev is the David & Inez Myers Professor in
Computational Neuroscience and former director of the
Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation (ICNC) at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.


Henry Markram
Brain Mind Institute, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Title: The Blue Brain Project


Bio sketch: Dr.Markram discovered a groundbreaking watershed synaptic
learning principle that underpins learning and memory processes. He is
the Project Director of the Blue Brain Project, Director of the Center
for Neuroscience & Technology and co-Director of EPFL's Brain Mind
Institute (BMI). At the BMI, in the Laboratory for Neural
Microcircuitry, Markram has continued his work to unravel the
blueprint of the neocortical column, building state-of-the-art tools
to carry out multi-neuron patch clamp recordings combined with laser
and electrical stimulation as well as multi-site electrical recording,
chemical imaging and gene expression.



The neocortical microcircuit exhibits computational power that is
impossible to match with any known technology. Deriving the blueprint
and its operational principles could therefore spur a new generation
of neuromorphic devices with immense computational power. The ultimate
aim of the ambitious Blue Brain Project is to simulate the brains of
mammals with a high level of biological accuracy and study the steps
involved in the emergence of biological intelligence.

Mary B. Kennedy
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

Title: Synaptic Nanomachines

 Bio sketch: Dr.Kennedy's work focuses on synaptic plasticity and
involves study of the functions of the signaling machinery in the
postsynaptic density as well as the development of computer
simulations of synaptic signaling to aid our understanding of how the
large number of signaling molecules present at the synapse may work
together. She is the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Biology at
the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and has been on the
faculty since 1981. She was awarded the Ipsen Foundation Prize in
Neuronal Plasticity, together with Drs. Eckhart Gundelfinger and
Morgan Sheng, in 2006. Mary Kennedy is the founding director of the
Center for Integrative Study of Cell Regulation, at Caltech. The
center scientists' work include development of algorithms for
identifying, locating, and determining the shape and orientation of
key proteins in high-resolution cryo-electron microscopic images of
cells, and creation of computer programs to simulate complex
biochemical signaling pathways in neuronal synapses.  Dr. Kennedy is
leading a program focusing on the modeling of biochemical mechanisms
in brain synapses to better understand the chemistry of learning and
memory.

Mitsuo Kawato
ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs, Japan

Title: Towards Manipulative Neuorscience based on Brain-Network-Interface

Bio sketch: Prof. Kawato received the B.S. degree in physics from
Tokyo University in 1976 and the M.E. and Ph. D. degrees in
biophysical engineering from Osaka University in 1978 and 1981,
respectively. From 1981 to 1988, he was a faculty member and lecturer
at Osaka University. Professor Kawato has served as a director of ATR
computational Neuroscience Laboratories and a research supervisor of
JST, ICORP Computational Brain Project. He is now concurrently working
as a visiting professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Nara
Institute of Science and Technology, Osaka University, the National
Institute for Physiological Sciences and Kyoto Prefectural University
of Medicine.  He has been appointed Toyama Prefectural University as a
Specially Appointed Visiting Professor. He was awarded the Yonezawa
founder's medal memorial special award of The Institute of
Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, in 1991, the
outstanding research award of the International Neural Network Society
in 1992, the Osaka Science Prize in 1993, the 10th Tsukahara
Naka-akira Memorial Award in 1996, the Tokizane Toshihiko Memorial
Award in 2001, IEICE fellow in 2004, the Chunichi Cultural Award and
the Shida Rinzaburo Award in 2005, the Asahi Prize in 2007.  He is a
governing board member of the Japanese Society of Neuroscience and a
Member of American Physiologica Society. He is currently serving as an
Editor of HFSP Journal.

For the last 15 years he has been working in computational
neuroscience and neural network modeling.  He published about 200
papers, reviews and books.  Research topics include simulation study
of dendritic spines, feedback-error-learning model and its
applications to industrial robot manipulators, movement trajectory
formation, bi-directional theory for interactions between cortical
areas, cerebellar internal models, and teaching by demonstration for
robots.

Professor Kawato's work focuses on constructing a brain in order to
understand the brain, through building a brain to the extent that we
can build a brain. More concretely, he has been investigating the
information processing of the brain with the long-term goal that
machines, either computer programs or robots, could solve the same
computational problems as those that the human brain solves, while
using essentially the same principles. With these general approaches,
he has greatly contributed in elucidating visual information
processing, optimal control principles for arm trajectory planning,
internal models in the cerebellum, teaching by demonstration for
robots, human interfaces based on electoromyogram, and applications in
rehabilitation medicine. Recently, he proposes a new experimental
paradigm; manipulative neuroscience.

David Van Essen
Washington University, St. Louis, USA

Title: A neuroinformatics perspective on cerebral cortical structure
and function



Bio sketch: David Van Essen is known for his research on the
structure, function, and development of the cerebral cortex in general
and the visual cortex in particular.  His physiological and anatomical
studies of macaque visual cortex provide many insights regarding
functional specialization and hierarchical organization. His studies
of human cerebral cortex provide insights regarding normal
variability, abnormalities in specific diseases, and patterns of
cortical development.  He has been a pioneer in the emerging field of
neuroinformatics through the development of a suite of brain-mapping
software, surface-based atlases of primates and rodents, and the
SumsDB database for online access and visualization of a growing body
of neuroimaging data.  He is currently Edison Professor and Head of
the Anatomy & Neurobiology Department at Washington University in St.
Louis.  He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of
Neuroscience, founding chair of the Organization for Human Brain
Mapping, and President of the Society for Neuroscience.  He is a
fellow of the AAAS and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award
from the St. Louis Academy of Science.

Mark H. Ellisman
University of San Diego, USA

Title: Brain Research in the Digital Age



Bio sketch:

Dr. Mark Ellisman is Professor of Neurosciences and Bioengineering at
the University of California San Diego.

In 1988, Ellisman established the National Center for Microscopy and
Imaging Research (NCMIR) to achieve greater understanding of the
structure and function of the nervous system by developing
three-dimensional light and electron microscopy methods spanning
dimensions from 5nm^3 to 50µm^3 .  Ellisman, also a founding fellow of
the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, has
received numerous awards including the Jacob Javits Neuroscience
Investigatory Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and
the Creativity Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Since 1996, he has been serving as the founding director of the UCSD
Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS) and has received
several teaching awards, including the Department of Neurosciences
Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1987 and 1992, and was named the
University Lecturer in Biomedicine in 2001. He is also the
interdisciplinary coordinator for the National Partnership for
Advanced Computing Infrastructure (NPACI) and led NPACI's Neuroscience
thrust, which involves integration of brain research and advanced
computing and communications technologies.

In 2001, Ellisman founded the Biomedical Informatics Research Network
(BIRN), a NIH initiative that provides a multiscale imaging
infrastructure linking major neuroimaging centers around the country.

The BIRN builds infrastructure and technologies to enable large-scale
biomedical data mining and refinement. The following year, he was
appointed to the National Advisory Council of the NIH National Center
for Research Resources (NCRR) and to the Physics Division Review
Committee of the Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Dr. Ellisman is recognized nationally and internationally for helping
to pioneer the development of new technologies that enhance
neurobiological and clinical research. His laboratory is actively
pursuing several research tracks that are yielding seminal
contributions to neuroscience.

Alan Evans

McGill University, Montreal, Canada



Title: The NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development


Bio sketch: Dr. Evans is currently the director of the Montreal
Consortium for Brain Imaging Research (MCBIR), a $35M multi-center
initiative to network the BIC with 6 other institutions engaged in
research in psychiatry, neurology, development and aging, cognitive
neuroscience, brain development and drug addiction and large-scale
brain data processing.

MCBIR provides the BIC with state-of-the-art equipment for human
(MRI/PET/MEG) and animal (MRI/PET) studies as well as extensive
computational resources.

Dr. Evans heads the data coordinating center for a large NIH-funded
multi-center MRI study of normal pediatric development. This project
provides a web-accessible reference database of normal maturation,
both neuroanatomical and behavioral, for studies of normal and
abnormal brain development. The methodologies developed for that
project, most notably (i) the web-based imaging/behavioral database,
(ii) the automated MRI segmentation pipeline, and (iii) the
brain-behavior correlation analysis for voxel-based (volumetric) or
vertex-based (surface) data, are being used in a series of
international collaborations on abnormal pediatric development and
Alzheimer's disease.


Thomas Mrsic-Flögel

University College London, UK


Title: Imaging functional organization and plasticity of neuronal
populations in intact visual cortex with single-cell resolution

Bio sketch: The vast majority of our knowledge about how the brain
encodes information has been obtained from recordings of one or few
neurons at a time or from global mapping methods such as fMRI. These
approaches have left unexplored how neuronal activity is distributed
in space and time within a cortical column and how hundreds of neurons
interact to process sensory information. By taking advantage of the
most recent advances in two-photon microscopy, the research in my lab
addresses the function, development and plasticity of primary visual
cortex: 1) to understand how cortical neuronal networks encode visual
information, and 2) to understand how they become specialised for
sensory processing during postnatal development. Specifically, we use
in vivo two-photon calcium imaging to record activity simultaneously
from hundreds of neurons in visual cortex while showing different
visual stimuli. This approach enables us to characterise in detail how
individual neurons and neuronal subsets interact within a large
cortical network in response to visual stimuli. We investigate the
maturation of cortical network function after the onset of vision and
assess the role of visual experience in this process.

I'll be doing a zip on their papers soon, thanks to:
http://heybryan.org/projects/autoscholar/

- Bryan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: INCF - Elli Chatzopoulou <elli.chatzopoulou at incf.org>
Date: Tue, May 6, 2008 at 4:22 AM
Subject: [Comp-neuro] neuroinformatics congress: abstract submission
deadline extended
To: comp-neuro at neuroinf.org


**** Abstract submission deadline extended until Friday, May 9th,
23h59 PDT ****

*NEW*: All congress abstracts will be published by Frontiers in
Neuroscience in a special issue and be attributed a DOI.

Opportunities for students:
Attendees of the INCF Autumn School from the EU are eligible to apply
for funding to cover expenses for both the Neuroinformatics2008
congress and the INCF Autumn School. The awards are intended to cover
low-price airfare, low-fare hostel accommodation for the full duration
of the congress and the course (i.e. 5 nights), and the congress
registration fee (early registration). We especially encourage
students from new EU countries to apply. Course applicants who wish to
apply for this funding should indicate this and provide an estimate of
the traveling costs in their CV or Autumn School application.

Online registration and abstract submission at www.neuroinformatics2008.org

Neuroinformatics 2008 program:

Keynote Speakers:

  * Mark Ellisman
  * Mitsuo Kawato
  * Mary Kennedy
  * Henry Markram
  * Idan Segev
  * David Van Essen


Workshops:

   *    Future hardware challenges to scientific computing
     Erik de Schutter (chair), Gabriel Wittum, Marc-Oliver Gewaltig,
     John Shalf

   *    Neurogenomics meets bioinformatics meets neuroinformatics in
     database research
     Robert Williams (chair), Ed Lein, Seth Grant, Kristen Harris

   *    Extraction of structural and functional information from brain
     images
     Ulla Ruotsalainen (chair), Katrin Amunts, Alan Evans, Thomas
     Mrsic-Flögel

   *    Challenges and benefits of multichannel electrophysiology
     Andrzej Wrobel (chair), György Buzsaki, Miguel Nicolelis, Xiaoqin
     Wang


Special session:

  Perspectives in funding research in neuroinformatics
    Kathie Olsen, Wolfgang Boch

The INCF Automn School on Methods in Neuroinformatics will be held in
conjunction with the Congress, September 10 - 11. --
Elli Chatzopoulou, Ph.D.
Scientific Information and Public Relations Officer

International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility
Secretariat
Karolinska Institutet
Nobels väg 15A
SE-171 77 Stockholm
Sweden

Email: elli.chatzopoulou at incf.org
Phone: +46 8 524 87491
Mobile: +46 7 614 87491
Fax: +46 8 524 87150
web: www.incf.org

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