Participants
Contact Info
Barry Ache
Barry
Ache Distinguished is Professor of Zoology and Neuroscience and Director of the
University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. His team studies projects linked to
odor coding. Natural odors are complex blends of chemicals that the brain
discriminates by the unique pattern of neural activity each odor generates. The
team has been trying to decipher the cellular and neural processes that give
rise to these patterns in order to ultimately understand how the brain
recognizes and discriminates odors. They investigate the sense of smell by
studying animal models for olfaction as diverse as the spiny lobster and the
mouse. Their longest-running project explores the cellular events by which
odors activate lobster olfactory receptor cells. The general focus of this
project is to understand the involvement of lipid signaling in olfactory
transduction. Research to date has made the lobster olfactory trp channel one
of the best characterized native trp channels. This work has the potential to
contribute to a broader understanding of this functionally important class of
ion channels as well as advance our understanding of the cellular mechanism of
olfactory transduction.
Dimitris Achlioptas
Dimitris Achlioptas received his B.Eng. in Computer
Engineering from the University of Patras in 1993 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer
Science from the University
of Toronto in 1995 and
1999. He subsequently joined Microsoft Research as a postdoctoral fellow, where
he has been a research staff member since 2000. His research interests are
centered around the interaction of random structures
with computation. He has served as program committee member for AAAI, FOCS,
ICML, ICDM, RANDOM, SODA, WAW and published in Nature, JACM, JAMS, Annals of
Mathematics and other journals. His recent work has included the analysis of
large random networks and the use of randomization to accelerate algorithms in
machine learning, information retrieval, and constraint satisfaction.
Henry Abarbanel
Henry Abarbanel is Professor of Physics and Research
Physicist (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) at the University
of California, San Diego. He also is Director of the
Institute for Nonlinear Science at UCSD. Over the past years he has developed
fundamental methods in nonlinear time series analysis and applied them to
optical physics, fluid dynamics, and the neurodynamics of biological neural
circuits with learning and memory. With the tools of nonlinear dynamics he
investigates how the neural substatrates of birdsong learn and maintain song.
His work ranges from the basic neurobiology of these circuits to
implementations of the circuits in analog electronics for use in applications
beyond the biological physics.
Estimating Entropy Rates with
Bayesian Confidence Intervals, Neural Comput. 2005 Jul;17(7):1531-76.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mitpress/neco/2005/00000017/00000007/art00008?token=005711f6068263c4a6f644a467b4d616d3f344b6e4e395e437a63736a423547664776762525533a44676c6f
Optical imaging of neuronal
populations during decision-making.
Science. 2005 Feb 11;307(5711):896-901.
Dynamical model of birdsong
maintenance and control. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2004 Nov;70(5 Pt 1):051911. Epub 2004 Nov 22.
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/e051911
Enhancement of synchronization in a
hybrid neural circuit by spike-timing dependent plasticity. J Neurosci.
2003 Oct 29;23(30):9776-85.
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/23/30/9776
Steven Bathiche
Steven
Bathiche has been an Inventor in the applied research group in the Microsoft
Hardware division since 1999. He obtained a BS in electrical engineering from
Virginia Tech and an MS in Bioengineering from the University of Washington.
While in Graduate school he developed the Mothmobile, a hybrid robot that uses
an insect as its control system via a neural electrical interface. He is the
inventor of the Microsoft Freestyle Pro game pad, a gaming device that employs
inertial sensors to deliver 4-degrees of freedom in control. Steve’s current
work focuses on creating new computer classes that push the boundaries of human
to machine interaction; focusing on new form factors, novel sensing techniques
and interactions, mobile computing, and cutting edge display technology. He has
been granted 8 patents, 6 of which are in shipping products, and has 26 pending
patents.
Kevin Briggman
I am a fifth year PhD student
in the Computational Neurobiology program at the University
of California, San Diego.
I am completing my thesis work in the lab of Dr. William Kristan and am
jointly advised by Dr. Henry Abarbanel.
I received my BS in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve
University and worked as
an analog design engineer at Intel Corporation before beginning graduate
school.
Malcolm Burrows
Malcolm
Burrows is a Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.
His primary research interest centers on questions about the neurobiological
foundations of movement with a focus on the underlying circuitry and role of
phase relationships between neurons, pattern and motion. His work has focussed particularly on insects
and crustaceans, especially their rhythmically patterned flight, swimming and
respiratory behaviors.
Shaun Cain
Shaun
Cain was awarded a PhD in 2001 at University
of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, based upon his work on neural and behavioral models for
responses of marine
organisms that clearly indicate their detection and orientation to the earthÕs
magnetic field. Since that time he has
served as Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington
Friday Harbor Laboratories studying the cellular
level details of transduction and integration of geomagnetic signals in the
seaslug Tritonia diomedea. His recent
published work spans the neural circuitry in molluscan brains and crustacean
antennular withdrawal, to behavioral and neural studies of geomagnetic
orientation in sea turtles, crustaceans and mollusks.
Robert Calin-Jageman
Undergraduate education in philosophy and cognitive
science at Albion
College (1998). Founder of a database design company (www.cocoa.digitalspace.net). Graduate work (2004) with Thomas M. Fischer in the
department of psychology at Wayne
State University
researching behavioral functions of short-term plasticity in Aplysia
californica. Currently
a post-doc with Paul Katz in the department of Biology at Georgia State
University. Current projects include the development of a
database of identified neurons (www.neuronbank.org)
and computational modeling of the Tritonia central-pattern generator.
Calin-Jageman, R.J. & Fischer, T. M. (2003). Synaptic augmentation contributes to
environment-driven regulation of the Aplysia siphon-withdrawal reflex. Journal of
Neuroscience, 23: 11611-11620.
Calin-Jageman, R.J. & Fischer, T. M. (2003). Temporal aspects of an environmental stimulus
influence the dynamics of behavioral regulation of the Aplysia SWR. Behavioral
Neuroscience, 117 , 555-565.
Greg Clark
Gregory
A. Clark, Ph.D. is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of
Bioengineering at the University
of Utah, where he is
Chair of the Neural Interfaces Track. He
received the Ph.D. degree in Biological Sciences from the University
of California, Irvine
in 1982; was a Post-doctoral Fellow and Research Associate at Columbia University
1982-1988; and an Assistant Professor at Princeton University
1988-1996. His laboratory uses
electrophysiological and computational approaches to investigate cellular- and
systems-level mechanisms of neuronal plasticity in sensory and motor systems,
neural information processing, and neuroprostheses. His researches have helped eludicate the
roles of hippocampus and cerebellum during learning in the mammalian brain and,
more recently, the of role of synaptic plasticity
during learning in simple model systems, the marine mollusks Aplysia and
Hermissenda. His work in
neuroprosthetics has helped develop biologically-inspired strategies for
stimulating peripheral nerve to restore motor function. He is the recipient of a Pew Biomedical
Scholar Award and Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and several Dean’s letters of
commendation at the University
of Utah.
Selected refs.
McCormick,
D.A., Clark, G.A., Lavond, D.G., and Thompson,
R.F. Initial
localization of the memory trace for a basic form of associative learning. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 79, 2731-2735,
1982.
Clark,
G.A., McCormick, D.A., Lavond, D.G. and Thompson, R.F. Effects of lesions of
cerebellar nuclei on conditioned behavioral and hippocampal neuronal responses.
Brain Res., 291, 125-136, 1984.
Clark,
G.A., and Kandel, E.R. Branch-specific
facilitation in Aplysia siphon sensory cells.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 81, 2577-2581, 1984.
Frost,
W.N., Clark, G.A., and Kandel, E.R. Parallel processing of
short-term memory for sensitization in Aplysia. J. Neurobiol., 19, 297-334, 1988.
Clark,
G.A., Hawkins, R.D., and Frost, W.N. How neural are neural networks? A comparison of information
processing and storage in artificial and real neural networks. J.
Statist. Plann. Inference, 33, 27
65, 1992.
Clark,
G.A. and Kandel, E.R. Induction of long-term facilitation in Aplysia sensory
neurons by local application of serotonin to remote synapses. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 90, 11411-11415,
1993.
Schuman, E.M. and Clark, G.A. Synaptic facilitation at
connections of Hermissenda Type B photoreceptors. J. Neurosci.,
14, 1613-1622, 1994.
Clark,
G.A., Hawkins, R.D., and Kandel, E.R. Activity dependent enhancement of
presynaptic facilitation provides a cellular mechanism for the temporal
specificity of classical conditioning in Aplysia. Learn. Memory,
1, 243 257, 1994.
Fost,
J.W. and Clark, G.A. Modeling Hermissenda: I.
Differential contributions of IA and IC reductions to Type B cell plasticity.
J. Comput. Neurosci., 3, 137-153, 1996a.
Fost,
J.W. and Clark, G.A. Modeling Hermissenda: II.
Effects of variations in Type B cell excitability, synaptic strength, and
network connectivity. J. Comput. Neurosci., 3,
155-172, 1996b.
Schultz, L.M., Butson, C.R., and Clark,
G.A. Post-light potentiation at type B to A photoreceptor connections in
Hermissenda. Neurobiol.
Learn. Mem., 76, 7-32, 2001.
Butson,
C.R. and Clark, G.A. Noise alters contextual spike timing relationships and
improves light encoding accuracy in a simulated Hermissenda photoreceptor
network. Soc. Neurosci. Abstr., 28, Program No. 848.6,
2002.
McDonnall
D., Clark G.A., Normann R. Selective motor unit recruitment via intrafascicular
multielectrode stimulation. Can.
J. Physiol. Pharmacol., 82, 599-609, 2004.
Clark, GA and Butson, CR. Optimal levels of channel and synaptic
noise improve light-intensity encoding in simulated Hermissenda photoreceptor
networks. 2004 Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner, Program 870.21. Washington, DC:
Society for Neuroscience, 2004. Online.
Edward Cutrell
Ed
has worked as a researcher in the Adaptive Systems & Interactions group at
MSR since 1999. Originally trained as a cognitive neuropsychologist, Ed’s
research is focused on the nexus of human cognition and information systems in
the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). His HCI research has included
work in human attentional control, multimodal perception and attention, basic
motor control work for input systems, and systems for memory management and
assistance (interfaces for information retrieval).
Tom Daniel
Tom
Daniel is the Chair of the University of Washington
Department of Biology and holds the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair. He
studies the control and dynamics of insect flight and has recently become
enamored with sensory information processing as part of the control system in
these animals as well as dynamical systems and large scale computing of
movement systems in biology. His background was in engineering and animal
locomotion with a Ph.D. from Duke Biology and postdoctoral training in
Engineering Sciences at Caltech. He is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship,
the UW Distinguished Teaching Award as well as the UW Distinguished Graduate
Mentor Award.
Selected references:
Chase, P.B., MacPherson, J.M, and Daniel, T.L. (2004). A spatially explicit model of the half sarcomere:
myofilament compliance affects Ca2+ regulation. Ann. Biomed.
Eng.
32,1559-1568
Tu, M.S. and Daniel, T.L. (2004). Cardiac like behavior in insect
flight muscle. J. Exp. Biol. 207,
2455-2464.
Tu, M.S. and Daniel, T.L. (2004) Submaximal power
output from the dorsolongitudinal flight muscles of the hawkmoth Manduca sexta. J. Exp. Biol. 207:4651-4662
Mavoori, J., Millard, B., Longnion, J., Danielt, T.L.,
and Diorio, C. (2004). A miniature implantable computer for functional electrical
stimulation and recording of neuromuscular activity. IEEE
(in press).
Charles Derby
Charles
Derby received a B.S. in Biology from the University
of North Carolina (1976), Ph.D. in
Biology from Boston University (1982), Postdoctoral Fellowship at the
Whitney Laboratory of the University
of Florida (1982-1984), and has been
on the faculty in the Dept. of Biology at Georgia State
University since
1985. His research involves studies of
the chemical senses -- smell and taste. The general objective is to understand
the ways in which nervous systems are organized to allow animals to detect,
identify, and respond to environmental chemicals. Crustaceans (lobsters, crabs,
crayfish) are the primary model organisms. Projects
include the following:
• How is odorant information processing in the
olfactory organ and in the brain?
• Why do animals have a diversity of chemosensors and
chemosensory pathways?
• How does the olfactory system change during
development and growth? How does cell proliferation and survival change with
social experiences, and what is the effect of this on chemosensory behavior and
learning?
• What are the molecular controls of the neurogenesis and maturation of
olfactory neurons in the olfactory organ?
• What mechanisms do animals use to chemically defend
themselves against predators?
Selected
References:
Kicklighter, C.E., S. Shabani, P.M.
Johnson, and C.D. Derby. 2005. Sea
hares use novel antipredatory chemical defenses. Current Biology 15: 549-554.
Stoss,
T.D., M. Nickell, D. Hardin, C.D. Derby, and T.S. McClintock. 2004. Inducible transcript
expressed by reactive epithelial cells at sites of olfactory sensory neuron
proliferation. J. Neurobiol. 58:
355-368.
Weissburg,
M.J., C.D. Derby, O. Johnson, B. McAlvin, and J.M Moffett Jr. 2001. Transsexual limb transplants
in fiddler crabs and the expression of novel sensory capabilities. J. Comp. Neurol.
440: 311-320.
Harrison, P.J.H., H.S. Cate, P. Steullet, and
C.D. Derby. 2001. Structural
plasticity in the olfactory system of adult spiny lobsters: postembryonic
development permits life-long growth, turnover, and regeneration. Marine & Freshwater Res. 52:
1357-1366.
Derby, C.D. and P. Steullet. 2001. Why do animals have so many receptors? The role of multiple chemosensors in animal perception. Biological Bulletin 200: 211-215.
Derby, C.D., P. Steullet, and A.J. Horner. 2001. The sensory basis to feeding behavior in the Caribbean spiny lobster Panulirus argus.
Marine & Freshwater Res. 52:
1339-1350.
Steullet, P., H.S. Cate, and C.D.
Derby. 2000. A spatiotemporal wave
of turnover and functional maturation of olfactory receptor neurons in the
spiny lobster Panulirus argus. J.
Neurosci. 20: 3282-3294.
Derby, C.D. 2000. Learning from spiny
lobsters about chemosensory coding of mixtures. Physiol. Behav. 69:
203-209.
John Doyle
John
Doyle is the John G Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical
Systems, Electrical Engineering, and BioEngineering at Caltech. BS and MS in EE, MIT (1977), and a PhD, Math, UC Berkeley (1984).
Almost 30 years of experience as a highly synergistic bridge builder between
mathematics and real world engineering.
A pioneer in the mathematics of robust control, LQG robustness,
(structured) singular value analysis, H-infinity and many recent
extensions. Coauthor
of several books and software toolboxes currently used at over 1,000 sites
worldwide, the main control analysis tool for high performance commercial and
military aerospace systems, as well as many other industrial systems.
Example industrial applications include X-29, F-16XL, F-15 SMTP, B-1, B-2, 757,
Shuttle Orbiter, electric power generation, distillation, catalytic reactors,
backhoe slope-finishing, active suspension, and CD players. Current research
interests are in theoretical foundations for complex networks in engineering
and biology, as well as multiscale physics. His research group led the
development of the open source Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) and the
Systems Biology Workbench (SBW), which have become the central software
infrastructures for systems biology (www.sbml.org), and also released the
analysis toolbox SOSTOOLS (www.cds.caltech.edu/sostools). Prize papers include the Institute for
Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Baker (for the top research paper in
all of the IEEE's ~90 journals, also ranked in the top 10 ``most important''
papers world-wide in pure and applied mathematics from 1981-1993), the IEEE
Automatic Control Transactions Axelby (twice), and the AACC Schuck. Individual awards include the IEEE Control
Systems Field Award (2004) and the Centennial Outstanding Young Engineer (1984). He has held national and world records and
championships in various sports.
Adrienne Fairhall
Adrienne Fairhall has an
undergraduate degree in theoretical physics from the Australian National
University, and earned
her PhD in physics, on the study of turbulent diffusion, from the Weizmann Institute
of Science in 1998. She moved into
neuroscience via a post-doc with Bill Bialek at NEC Research Labs where she
worked on neural coding in the motion sensitive neurons of the fly. In a second postdoc she recorded from retinal
ganglion cells using multielectrode arrays with Michael Berry in the Department
of Molecular Biology at Princeton
University. She joined
the faculty of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington in 2004. She holds a
Burroughs-Wellcome “Careers at the Scientific Interface” grant and a Sloan
Fellowship.
Selected references:
B. Aguera y Arcas and A. L. Fairhall. What causes a neuron to spike? Neural Comp.
15: 1715-1749 (2003)
B.
Aguera y Arcas, A. L. Fairhall and W. Bialek, Computation in a single
neuron: Hodgkin and Huxley revisited.
Neural Comp. 15: 1789-1807 (2003)
A.
L. Fairhall, G. Lewen, W. Bialek and R. de Ruyter van Steveninck, Efficiency
and ambiguity in an adaptive neural code, Nature, 412:787-792 (2001)
Alan Gelperin
I have collaborated with, mentored and learned from a
group of talented computational neuroscientists, first at Princeton
University and then at Bell
Laboratories in Murray Hill,
NJ. This group includes Terry Sejnowski, John Hopfield,
David Tank, David Kleinfeld, Sebastian Seung, Dan Lee and Bard Ermentrout. I
was fortunate to be a member for 15 years of the Biological Computation
Research Department at Bell Laboratories, headed by my first postdoctoral
colleague at Bell Labs, David Tank. For the past five years I have taught in
the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course during the month of
August at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. My current work
in Computational Olfaction is carried out in collaboration with the following
group of physicists and engineers:
1.
Dima Rinberg (Ph.D. in Physics from Weizmann Institute, Israel)
2.
Dan Lee, Electrical Engineering, Univ. Pennsylvania
3.
Kwabena Boahen, Bioengineering, Univ. Pennsylvania
4,
Charley Johnson, Physics, Univ. Pennsylvania
5.
Graeme Lowe (Ph.D. in Physics from CalTech)
6.
Alex Koulakov (Ph.D. in Physics from Univ. Minnesota)
Recent
Relevant Publications:
Gelperin,
A. and Hopfield,
J.J. (2002) Electronic
and computational olfaction. In P. Given (ed.) Chemistry of Taste, American Chemical
Society, Washington,
DC. 289-317.
Gelperin,
A. (2002) Invertebrate learning: Associative conditioning in Limax. In:
Learning and Memory, 2nd. Edition, Ed. J. Byrne, Macmillan
Pub. Co., pp.281-287.
Ermentrout,
B., Wang, J. W., Flores, J., Gelperin, A. (2004) Model for transition from
waves to synchrony in the olfactory lobe of Limax J Comput. Neurosci.,
17:365-383..
Dalton. P., Gelperin, A., Preti, G. (2004)
Volatile metabolic monitoring of glycemic status in diabetes using electronic
olfaction. Diabetes Technol. Therapeutics 6: 534-544.
Rhanor Gillette
Rhanor Gillette is Professor
of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. His studies on
behavior and neural mechanisms in invertebrate model systems in the mollusca
and cnidarians brought him early on into the physiology of decision-making.
Selected references:
Gillette,
R., Kovac, M. P. and Davis, W. J.
Command neurons in Pleurobranchaea
receive synaptic feedback from the motor network they excite. Science 199, 798-801
(1978).
Davis, W. J.
and Gillette, R. Neural correlate of behavioral plasticity in command neurons of Pleurobranchaea. Science
199, 801-804 (1978).
Gillette,
R., Saeki, M. and Huang, R.-C. Defense mechanisms in notaspidean
snails: Acid humor and evasiveness. Journal of Experimental
Biology 156, 335-347 (1991).
Jing,
J. and Gillette, R. Escape swim network interneurons have diverse roles in
behavioral switching and putative arousal in Pleurobranchaea. Journal of Neurophysiology, 83, 1346-1355 (2000).
Gillette, R., Huang, R.-C., Hatcher,
N. and Moroz, L. L. Cost-benefit analysis
potential in feeding behavior of a predatory snail by integration of hunger,
taste and pain. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, USA 97, 3585-3590 (2000).
Simon Giszter
Simon
Giszter was educated at University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK and at University of Oregon,
Eugene OR. His thesis advisor was Dr. Graham Hoyle. His postdoctoral Advisor
was Emilio Bizzi. After Postdoctoral work he was a research Scientist with
Emilio Bizzi at MIT from 1991-1994. He has been Faculty at Drexel University College
of Medicine in Philadelphia
from 1994 until present. His main focus
of research is modularity in motor control and especially spinal cord.
Eric Horvitz
Eric
Horvitz is a Senior Researcher and Group Manager of the Adaptive Systems &
Interaction team at Microsoft Research. He received his PhD and MD at Stanford University. His interests center on principles and
machinery for guiding sensing, reasoning, and action under uncertainty. In much
of his work, he has employed probabilistic and decision-theoretic concepts and
methods for understanding and constructing intelligent reasoning systems. He
has pursued an understanding of intelligence and its automation via studying
principles of reasoning under limited resources. Efforts in this realm include
the formulation and study of flexible computational procedures, the expected
value of computation, utility-directed metareasoning, models of continual
computation, and bounded optimality.
Eric has been elected a Fellow and Councilor of the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence. He has served on DARPA’s Information Science and
Technology Study Group and the Naval Research Advisory Committee. He is the Editor of the Decisions,
Uncertainty, and Computation Area of the Journal of the ACM and is serving as
the Chair of the Association for Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence.
Selected references available
at:
www.research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/abstracts.htm
Nebojsa Jojic
Nebojsa Jojic received his
PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2001, where he was also the recipient of the
Robert T. Chien Award for excellence in research in 2000, and the Microsoft
Graduate Fellowship in 2000 and 2001. Since 2000, he has been with Microsoft
Research, Redmond, where he has conducted research in the areas of computer
vision, computational biology, signal processing and machine learning. He has
published over 40 papers in these areas. In addition to UIUC and Microsoft, Dr.
Jojic was also employed by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
as a consultant in the area of computer vision and computer graphics.
Selected references available
at:
www.research.microsoft.com/~jojic/epitome.html
Radhika Nagpal
Radhika
Nagpal is an assistant professor in Computer Science at Harvard University,
since Sept 2004. Prior to that she was a Research Fellow in the Dept. of
Systems Biology at Harvard
Medical School,
and a postdoc and graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab where
she received her PhD in 2001. She recently received the 2005 Microsoft New
Faculty Fellowship award.
Andrew Ng
Andrew Y. Ng is an assistant
professor is the Computer Science department of Stanford University. His research focuses on machine learning, and
its applications to robotic control and to semantic natural language
understanding/reasoning.
Selected references:
Abbeel,
P. and Ng, A.Y. Apprenticeship learning via inverse reinforcement learning, Proceedings of the Twenty-first
International Conference on Machine Learning, 2004.
http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/icml04-apprentice.pdf
Ng. A.Y. and Russell, S. Algorithms for inverse
reinforcement learning, Proceedings of
the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, 2000.
http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/icml00-irl.pdf
Kiisa Nishikawa
Kiisa
Nishikawa is an Advance Visiting Scholar in the
Department of Biology at the University
of Washington, and a Regents'
Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona
University. Her current
research has three components: 1) evolutionary studies of the biomechanics and
neural control of prey capture in frogs; 2) studies of the more general problem
of how brains and nervous systems evolve; and 3) studies of the mechanisms of
power amplification in muscles that produce ballistic movements, including prey
capture and jumping in frogs and prey capture in chameleons.
Selected
references:
Nishikawa, K.C.
1997. Emergence of novel functions during brain evolution. Bioscience
47:341-354.
Nishikawa, K.C.
2002. Evolutionary convergence in nervous systems: Insights from comparative
phylogenetic studies. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 59:240-249.
Laboratory URL: http://www2.nau.edu/~kiisa/
Garry Odell
Garrett M. Odell grew up in
East Orange New Jersey.
Garry’s grandmother used to talk to him about two of their famous
ancestors, Sir Frances Drake and Sir Issac Newton and thus at a fairly early
age Garry felt compelled to choose between a life of piracy and a life filled
with differential equations; he chose the latter. Garry received his BA at Johns Hopkins
University in Engineering Science and
his Ph.D. at Johns
Hopkins University
in Theoretical Mechanics. He began his
academic career as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematical
Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He quickly moved through the ranks to become
a full professor at RPI within 8 years of his initial appointment. During this time he was named a Guggenheim
Fellow and had sabbatical visiting professorships at the University
of California, Berkeley and the University of Oxford, England.
In 1986 Dr. Odell was appointed Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Dr. Odell is currently the Director of the
Center for Cell Dynamics, an NIGMS-funded
Center of Excellence in
Systems Biology on the campus of the Friday Harbor Laboratories. He has over 25 peer-reviewed publications and
has several published works of software. Anyone who meets Garry is struck by his easy smile, palpable enthusiasm, and
overt brilliance. However, anyone who knows Garry would agree that an eye
patch and parrot sitting on his shoulder would indeed complement the character
of this man!
Michael Reiser
Michael
Reiser is a graduate student in the Computation and Neural Systems program at
Caltech, where he plans to receive his Ph.D. in 2006. He is a member of Michael Dickinson's lab, a
multi-disciplinary group focused on the neurobiology, aerodynamics, and
behavior of flies. Michael received B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Engineering from the University
of Florida in 2000, and an M.S. degree
in Electrical Engineering (emphasis in Controls and Machine Learning) from the University of California,
Berkeley in
2002. Michael has received best student paper awards on papers presented at the
International Workshop on Biologically-Inspired Robotics in 2002, and the
American Controls Conference in 2004. Michael is interested in applying
biological principles to robotic systems, and seeking out control systems
present in nature. His current research includes behavioral experiments of
flying insects, modular electronics for rapid development of behavioral
stimuli, and computational and robotic implementations of fly-inspired control
systems. Michael is extending this work towards studies of biological sensor
fusion architectures and system identification methodologies applied to animal
behavior.
Web:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~mreiser/
Key
references:
M.
Reiser et al., Vision as a Compensatory Mechanism for Disturbance Rejection in
Upwind Flight, 2004 American Control Conference.
Reiser, M. and Dickinson,
M. (2003). A test
bed for insect-inspired robotic control. /Philos. T. Roy. Soc. A/, 361(1811):2267–2285.
Adam C. Roberts
Adam C. Roberts earned his BA
in Psychology and Biology from Emporia
State University,
graduating Magna Cum Laude. After completing a MS in Experimental Psychology
from Emporia State University,
he then entered the Ph.D. program in Physiological Science at UCLA. In the laboratory of Dr. David Glanzman at
UCLA, Roberts has investigated the cellular mechanisms that mediate behavioral
sensitization in the marine snail Aplysia. Roberts has shown that, contrary to previous
conclusions, sensitization in Aplysia
depends critically upon postsynaptic mechanisms, including release of calcium
from postsynaptic intracellular stores and modulation of the trafficking of
postsynaptic AMPA receptors. A paper
describing these results is currently in press in the Journal of Neuroscience. More recently,Roberts
has focused on intracellular signaling pathways required for long-term
sensitization of in Aplysia. His evidence indicates that PI3 kinase and a
rapamycin-sensitive pathway play critical roles in this simple form of
long-term memory. Roberts will obtain
his doctoral degree in Fall 2005, and will pursue
postdoctoral studies with Dr. Ben Philpot at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill. In Dr. Philpot’s
laboratory Roberts will investigate synaptic plasticity in the visual cortex of
wild-type and transgenic mice.
Jacqueline Rose
Throughout my research career
my work has centered around neural plasticity,
particularly mechanisms of memory. As an
undergraduate at the University
of Calgary I first did a
research project examining long-term memory in the fresh water pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis. I then did an Honors thesis focusing on long-term potentiation (a
putative mechanism of memory in mammals) recorded from motor cortex in awake,
behaving rats. I then completed a Master's degree at Queen's University looking
at the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in reward memory in rats. In the
next few months I will complete my doctoral degree at the University of British
Columbia where I have worked in the laboratory of
Dr. Catharine Rankin focusing on
mechanisms of learning and memory using the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, as a model system.
Mike Shadlen
Dr. Shadlen is an
Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Physiology
and Biophysics at the University
of Washington. He is also
an adjunct Associate Professor of Neurology and Core Staff of the National Primate Research
Center at the University of Washington.
He received his B.A. degree in biology and his medical degree from Brown University.
He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California
Berkeley, where he studied with Ralph D. Freeman.
He completed residency training in Neurology at Stanford Hospital.
He returned to research as a Howard Hughes Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the
laboratory of William T. Newsome. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1995. He was appointed to
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1999.
Selected
references:
Shadlen, M.N. and J.I.
Gold, The neurophysiology of
decision-making as a window on cognition, in The Cognitive Neurosciences, 3rd edition., M.S. Gazzaniga, Editor. 2004, MIT Press.
http://www.shadlen.org/~mike/papers/mine/shadlen_gold2004.pdf
Gold JI, Shadlen MN
(2002) Banburismus and the brain: decoding the relationship between sensory
stimuli, decisions, and reward. Neuron 36:299-308.
http://www.shadlen.org/~mike/papers/mine/gold_shadlen2002.pdf
For full bibliography
with links to papers, see
http://www.shadlen.org/~mike/papers/mine/shadlen_bibliography.htm
Satinder Singh
Satinder Singh is an Associate Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Prior to this he
was a principal member of the technical staff in the AI group at
AT&T labs, and prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Computer
Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
He has published extensively in the field of reinforcement learning and more
recently has turned to computational game theory to understand multiagent
systems, and to economic mechanism design to understand the role of incentives
in designing multiagent systems.
Joseph Sisneros
Currently an Assistant Professor in the Dept of
Psychology (Animal Behavior Program) at the University of Washington. Prior to his current position he was a postdoc and
research associate in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell
University (1999-2004) where he investigate the investigated the effects of
seasonal reproductive-state and steroid hormones on the frequency hearing
sensitivity of the midshipman fish. He received a Ph.D in Biology (1999) from
the Florida Institute of Technology where he investigated ontogenetic and
androgen-induced changes in the response properties and function of the elasmobranch
electrosensory system. His primary research interests center on how sensory
systems of fishes function in natural ecological settings and how the brain
processes and discriminates biologically relevant information such as social
and reproductive-related communication signals.
Key
References: http://faculty.washington.edu/sisneros/sisneros.htm
Andrew Straw
Andrew
Straw is a postdoctoral scholar in Bioengineering at the California Institute
of Technology, where he studies visually guided free-flight behavior of flies.
He received a Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide,
Australia in 2004 with a thesis entitled "Neural Responses to Moving
Natural Scenes.
Selected
references:
Straw, AD, O'Carroll, DC, &
Shoemaker PA. (2002) Adaptive
motion detectors inspired by insect vision. Proceedings of
the First World Congress on Biomimetics and
Artificial Muscles.
Shoemaker, PA, Straw, AD, and O’Carroll, DC. (2005, in
press) Velocity constancy and models for wide-field visual
motion detection in insects.
Biological Cybernetics.
Fry, SN, Müller P, Baumann H-J, Straw AD, Bichsel M,
& Robert D. (2004) Context-dependent stimulus presentation to freely moving
animals in 3D.
Journal of Neuroscience Methods.
Shoemaker, PA, O’Carroll, DC, and Straw, AD. (2001) Implementation of visual motion detection with contrast
adaptation. Proceedings of the SPIE 4591: 316-327
Rüdiger Wehner
Over the past three decades Rüdiger Wehner’s
research has revolved around the general question how a 0.1-mg brain of a 10-mg
insect solves complex computational tasks. In trying to answer this question he
focused on the extraordinary navigational skills of visually guided desert
ants, Cataglyphis, and did so by interactively combining behavioural
experiments with optical, neurophysiological and neuroanatomical studies,
computer simulations and, most recently, robotics implementations. This
interdisciplinary enterprise has led to the analysis of a number of dedicated
neural systems that deal with particular aspects of the ant‘s overall
navigational task. How these neural modules interact provides insights into the
computational strategies of neural systems and the insect‘s "distributed
intelligence." Wehner was Andrew Dickson White Professor (at Large) at Cornell University
and held many Named Lectureships in the USA. He received the Marcel Benoist
Prize (the so-called Swiss Nobel Prize), the Carus Prize of the German Academy
of Science (Leopoldina), and the Karl-von-Frisch Prize of the German Zoological
Society. Wehner is a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society, a
Foreign Honorary Member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German Academy
of Sciences, the Austrian
Academy of Sciences, the
Academia Europea and others.
Selected references:
Wehner, R. (2003): Desert ant navigation: how
miniature brains solve complex tasks. Karl von Frisch Lecture. Karl von Frisch
Lecture. J. Comp. Physiol. A 189: 579-588
Wehner, R., Srinivasan, M.V. (2003): Path integration
in insects. In: The neurobiology of spatial behaviour. K.J. Jeffery (ed.), pp. 9-30. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Dennis Willows
Dennis Willows is Professor of Biology and Director
of the University
of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories. His work is aimed primarily to understand the
neural basis of behavior in marine mollusks and lately, especially the
mechanisms underlying geomagnetic sensing and orientation in the sea slug
Tritonia. As well, he is attempting to
develop implantable microcomputers to monitor and manipulate behavior by
recording and stimulating intracellularly in freely behaving animals in the
field.
Andy Wilson
Andy Wilson is currently a member of the Adaptive
Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research, where he dreams of a day
when commodity user interfaces work half as well as they do in the movies. He received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab in
2000, and BA in computer science with a minor in cognitive psychology at
Cornell in 1993. His interests lie in
novel interfaces based on sensing techniques such as computer vision, wireless
inertial sensing, gesture recognition, and probabilistic reasoning.
Russell Wyeth
Russell
received his undergraduate degree in Biology from the University
of Victoria, before completing his
doctorate in Zoology at the University
of Washington. His research interests include the ecology,
behavior and neurobiology of marine invertebrates - sponges, sea squirts and sea
slug, in particular. His dissertation,
advised by A.O. Dennis Willows focused on the field behaviors and chemosensory
abilities of the sea slug /Tritonia diomedea/, laying the foundation for
further work on the neural control of navigation in this species. Over the last 5 years, Dennis and Russell
also collaborated with Karl Bohringer (University of Washington, Department of
Electrical Engineering), attempting to create implantable silicon devices
capable of recording intracellular neural signals from freely behaving
animals. He recently began post-doctoral
work in the lab of Andrew French at Dalhousie
University, where he will
be using voltage clamp and pharmacological methods to study the central nervous
system control of mechanoreceptors in spider legs. Outside of research, Russell enjoys soccer,
SCUBA diving, gardening, and fiction.
Selected
Publications:
Mackie GO and Wyeth RC. 2000. Conduction and coordination in deganglionated
ascidians. Can.J.Zool. 78 (9):1626-1639.
Hanein Y, Bohringer KF, Willows AOD, and Wyeth RC. 2002. Towards MEMS probes for intracellular recording.
Sensors Update 10 (1.3):1-29.
Govindarajan
AV, Chen, TC, , and Böhringer KF. submitted. Intracellular neuronal recording with
flexible micro-machined probe implants.
Wyeth
RC and Willows AOD. submitted. Field
behavior of the nudibranch mollusc, /Tritonia diomedea/..
Richard Zemel
Richard Zemel received his
B.A. (Honors) degree from Harvard University in 1984, and his M.Sc. (1989) and Ph.D.
(1993) degrees from the University
of Toronto. He did postdoctoral work at the Salk
Institute and at Carnegie Mellon University
before becoming a faculty member in the Departments of Psychology and Computer
Science at the University
of Arizona. He returned to the University of Toronto Computer Science Department in 2000. He is also an Adjunct Member of the Center
for Vision Research at York
University. Zemel's research interests cover a range of
topics in machine learning, visual perception, and neural coding. Specific interests include unsupervised
learning, boosting, perceptual learning,
representations of visual motion, multisensory integration, and probabilistic
models of neural representations.
Selected references:
"Probabilistic
computation in spking populations" by R. Zemel, Q.
Huys, R,
Natarajan, and P. Dayan. In Advances in Neural
Information Processing Systems, 17, 2005.
"Inference
and computation with population codes" by A. Pouget, P.
Dayan, & R. Zemel.
Annual Rev. Neuroscience, 26:381-410, 2003.
"Spiking
Boltzmann machines" by G. Hinton & A. Brown. In Advances in Neural Information
Processing Systems, 12, 122-129, 2000.
"Bayesian
computation in recurrent neural circuits" by R. Rao.
Neural Computation, 16: 1-38,
2004.
"Probabilistic
interpretation of population codes" by R. Zemel, P.
Dayan, & A. Pouget.
Neural Computation, 10: 403-430, 1998.