UVMcomplexity
Brains need to make quick sense of massive amounts of ambiguous information with minimal energy costs and have evolved an intriguing mixture of analog and digital mechanisms to allow this efficiency. Analog electrical and biochemical signals inside neurons are used for integrating synaptic inputs from other neurons. The digital part is the all-or-none action potential, or spike, that lasts for a millisecond or less and is used to send messages over a long distance. Spike coincidences occur when neurons fire together at nearly the same time. In this lecture I will show how rare spike coincidences can be used efficiently to represent important visual events and how this architecture can be implemented with analog VLSI technology to simplify the early stages of visual processing.
On February 24, 2012, the Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont invited Professor Terrence Sejnowski to discuss this topic as part of the Complex Systems Spire Speaker Series. Terrence Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a Professor of Biology and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Co-Director of the Institute for Neural Computation.
For more information, go to : www.uvm.edu/complexsystems
