OCNC2008

Hi everybody.

By the age of 7, I decided to become a professional toy inventor. But that never happened. My rock-star career was aborted due to my lack of knowledge of any musical instrument. I was much too heavy to become a ballet dancer and much too light for sumo competitions. Therefore I studied (particle) physics and somehow managed to get a PhD working on data analysis of particle collisions in CERN detectors.

After deciphering the quantum world, I decided to decipher the brain. And I have to admit that I (partly) failed. But that allowed me to visit Marseille, where I studied rhythm generation and maturation, Antwerp, where I discovered homeostasis, parameter tuning and a couple of good beers and Boston, where I continue to work on single cell and small network modeling, when not shoveling snow.

I'm delighted to come again to Okinawa and meet you all.

I am Pablo Achard and I approved this message (I hope that the US presidential campaign was broadcast enough to make this sentence understandable worldwide...)

Gordon did a degree in physiology in the dim and distant past and since then he has worked on the nervous system, He is no mathematician (First Ordinary Maths at Aberdeen failed) but has always been interested -- failure does that for you. He has published with several mathematicians and enjoys the cut and thrust of debate, He doesn't mind being wrong so long as the evidence -- or the sums -- are convincing! Mind you he can take some convincing...

I'm really looking forward to talking to you all and beginning to form the kind of collaboration of ideas that is my real reason for teaching at all. You folks all know stuff that I can only vaguely grasp so if we can share even some of our experience we will all be richer.

Tony Bell is one of the founding members of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. He is primarily known for his work on ICA. He comes from Northern Ireland, has a degree in Computer Science and Philosophy from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Free University of Brussels, and has also worked many years at the Salk Institute with Terry Sejnowski.

I studied Physics at IIT Kanpur, India, and Cambridge University, UK, before taking the plunge into Biology for my PhD at Caltech. I am now at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, in Bangalore. I have done experiments on rats and on tissue cultures, and have worked in computational neuroscience and what is popularly called systems biology. I think these are all just labels for whatever approaches happen to work for studying the grand complexity of biology and the brain. I am currently interested in olfactory sensory processing and memory, from molecules to networks.

You have the privilege and challenge to come into Neuroscience at a time when it is a matter of fact that machines can outcompute humans at many of the tasks that were once thought to be the hallmarks of intelligence. Over the coming weeks you will see how to use the same machines to ferret out the amazing but not impenetrable complexity of the brain. Somewhere in these details, and in the marriage of computational and experimental biology, are the seeds of an understanding of the brain. I believe this is the greatest adventure of our age. I welcome you to Okinawa to begin on this journey and meet some of the people who will share this challenge with you in the years to come.

My name is Felix Biessmann, I am working as a research assistant in a collaboration between the machine learning dept. at TU Berlin and the neurophysiology dept. of the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen. The aim of my project is to learn more about the mechanisms of neurovascular coupling using functional magnetic resonance imaging in combination with electrophysiological recordings and neurochemical measurements. In particular, we are investigating the effect of neuromodulators such as acetylcholine on both hemodynamic response and electrophysiology. Other than that I am interested in neuroinformatics eand machine learning.

Robert Butera is an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA, USA). His current research interests include the neural basis of respiration, dynamics of bursting neurons, intrinsic and synaptic mechanisms for synchronization, and conduction properties of peripheral nerve and their block by high frequency stimulation. His approaches include single neuron models, complex neuron models, electrophysiology experiments, and the use of the dynamic clamp. Robert believes strongly in the value of complementary skills and perspectives, and as a result has multiple collaborative funded projects with both modelers and experimentalists.

Robert received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Rice University (Houston, TX, USA) in 1996, where his PhD work focused on the modeling and analysis of R15 (a bursting neuron in Aplysia) and its neuromodulation. From 1996-1999 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD) working jointly with John Rinzel and Jeff Smith modeling brainstem neurons involved in respiratory rhythm generation. Since 1999 he has been on the faculty at Georgia Tech.

The intent of this talk is to make sure we are all conversant in basic concepts used to describe and analyze dynamical systems. I would rather cover less material in more depth, so questions are encouraged and this outline is flexible. My lectures will be a mixture of simulation demonstrates and occasional figures from references where necessary. I have taught courses on this material, as well as electrophysiological modeling, to bioengineering and neuroscience students for 9 years at Georgia Tech, so I am used to a wide range of questions and perspectives on this material. So while my talk my seem mathematical, I am not a mathematician myself and am more of a "end user" of these methods when they are helpful for my computational neuroscience projects.

My background is theoretical physics followed by software engineering, neuroscience and a little hardware design. I am particularly interested in applications where innovative use of models and software opens up new experimental possibilities, such as automated model validation, and in the space between bottom-up modeling and machine learning.

Specifically, efforts to design computational systems that use physiologically plausible components to perform behavioral tasks have several interesting outcomes. They help to understand real networks by attaching functional roles to physiological phenomena; they can generate hypotheses about what structures may be needed for particular behaviors; and they lead into novel software architectures for robust parallel systems.

Recently I have been working on new software for efficiently computing the behavior of neurons with stochastic ion channels http://www.psics.org. This will be available to any students wishing to study such models.

My research focuses on the study of the basal ganglia physiology as well as pathology. On a more general manner I'm interested in system neuroscience. So far I have been conducting mainly electrophysiology experiments and I'd like to add a computational flavor to my biologist background. I really hope the course will help me with that. I'm very excited by the approaching OCNC and I'm looking forward to meeting you all.

Hello my name is Benedetto and I am doing my post-doc at Caltech. Although I am often a very indecisive person I study how people make choices. Making decisions and generating preferences among choice options is one of the most important aspects of human behavior, often seen as reflecting free will. Economic 'choice theory' assumes people have a stable representation of the value of each option (decision utility), and use logical rules in choosing between them. Much empirical data challenge this view. My research question is to understand how the brain constructs preferences and how our emotional state and cognitive limitations dynamically shape this process. Looking forward to meet all of you in Okinawa.

Dr Sophie Deneve studied in the field of neuroscience and mathematics at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She obtained her PhD in Brain and cognitive sciences at University of Rochester in 2003, in the laboratory of Alex Pouget. After a postdoc in Gatsby Computational Neuroscience unit, London, she became an assistant professor at the institute of cognitive science in Lyon, in 2004. In 2006, she moved to Paris to lead the Group for Neural Theory, a EU funded team of researchers in the field of computational neuroscience. Her main research interests include investigating the neural basis of probabilistic inference and learning.

Welcome to Okinawa! I moved to this beautiful island a bit over a year ago. My first visit to Okinawa was as faculty of OCNC2006 and I immediately liked the place and the beautiful views of the East China Sea from Seaside House. So it should come as no surprise that my lab space is now in the Seaside House, where the course takes place. You already know my secretary Tsuyuki and during these 3 course weeks the lab will hold open house and welcome all students and faculty to visit and use our facilities (but don't move books or equipment out of the lab please).

I have been teaching for more than 10 years at European CNS summer schools and was part of the last two OCNCs. It is always exciting to meet the diverse groups of highly motivated young scientists attending our courses. These courses have an important function in teaching computational methods and approaches, and in establishing social networks among the participants. Ideally every neuroscientist, including experimentalists and clinicians, should attend a CNS course because computational methods have become essential tools to understand the complex systems we are studying.

There is a broad range of modeling approaches available. I have specialized in bottom-up methods that are very accessible to experimentalists as they are mainly parameter driven. This includes large compartmental models of neurons with active dendrites, networks with realistic connectivity using conductance based neuron models and reaction-diffusion models of molecular interactions. I will focus on the latter during my methods presentation, but please feel free to ask me or my collaborators about our other work!

Alain Destexhe is Research Director at CNRS and his research interests stand at the interface between physics (dynamical systems) and neuroscience (electrophysiology). Applying concepts of dynamical systems and complex systems to analyze neuronal activity, as well as designing models of single neurons and neuronal networks, is at the basis of his research. His research team at CNRS is mostly composed of physicists, who together work very close to experimental data with biologists, as exemplified by the dynamic-clamp technique, which directly puts in interaction theoretical mode ls with living neurons (in collaboration with Thierry Bal at UNIC). This combination of disciplines is necessary to understand neuronal operations in complex dynamical states such as in the awake brain. Alain Destexhe is also Editor in Chief of the Journal of Computational Neuroscience and he is actively involved in the organization of conferences and summer schools in the field.

I'd be happy to help to an question or to realize projects, if needed you can email me at Destexhe@iaf.cnrs-gif.fr

Kenji Doya took BS in 1984, MS in 1986, and PhD in 1991 at the University of Tokyo. He became a research associate at U.Tokyo in 1986, U.C. San Diego in 1991, and Salk Institute in 1993. He joined ATR in 1994 and is currently the head of Computational Neurobiology Department, ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories. In 2004, he was appointed as a Principal Investigator of the Initial Research Project, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. He is interested in understanding the functions of basal ganglia and neuromodulators based on the theory of reinforcement learning.

Welcome to OCNC 2008! The last two courses were hit by typhoons in the end, so this year we shifted the course one week earlier. Let us see how typhoons like computational neuroscience. I hope what you experience here in Okinawa, not only the lectures and the projects but also the variety of people at the course and the nature and culture of this fine island, will be the most exciting and valuable ones. I myself has been benefitting a lot from the courses and am looking forward to see what I can learn this time.

I obtained my BSc (Hons) in Theoretical Physics from the Australian National University and my PhD in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. After that I did my postdoctoral work on adaptive coding with Bill Bialek at NEC Research Institute and with Michael J. Berry at Princeton University. During my PhD and postdoctoral years I was lucky to have the opportunity to spend a little time at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and in the Cognitive Neuroscience Sector at SISSA, in Trieste. Finally I joined the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington, Seattle as a faculty member in 2004. I have visited Okinawa once before for this school and have great memories of the experience -- nothing better than talking science in fabulous locations. I'm looking forward to meeting you all there!

Functional Imaging Laboratory, University College London

My original background is in philosophy, followed by a flirtation with medicine, and I now work jointly in the Clinical Neurosciences department at the Institute of Psychiatry, KCL, and the Emotion and Cognition group at the Functional Imaging Laboratory, UCL.

I use fMRI together with single-unit and local field data recorded from electrodes implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients to explore the neural processes underlying emotion and decision-making. Currently my main focus is on using time series analysis, particularly measures of synchronisation and effective connectivity, to look at how task performance is mediated by interactions between spatially distant regions. I want to use computational models to explore the neuronal bases of the changing connectivity patterns I observe.

My name is Bertrand. I'm a phd student at the Computer Science department of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. My background is in signal processing engineering. I'm interested in the bat auditory system, in particular the pathways that process cues for sound localization. I'm trying to build a biologically plausible model of the sub-cortical auditory system and implement it on our bat-head robot to perform echolocation.

Beside that, I'm involved with music. I play different instruments and have a home studio. I record and mix my own songs. I'm also interested in languages, I do speak four fluently and I'm learning more, but Japanese seems too hard in such a short time.

This will be my first time at the OCNC and I am looking forward to meeting you in a beautiful and stimulating environment. In the last 6 years I have held many lectures and tutorials on NEST, first at the University of Freiburg and later at the Advanced Courses in Computational Neuroscience in Obidos and Arcachon. Each lecture and each tutorial is an exciting and stimulating experience for me, because each student has a unique approach, a unique topic, and a unique point of view. Every time I learn something new and it is your feedback that will improve NEST.

Over the years I have shifted my focus from a very technical perspective of neural simulation towards the question of how neural systems and simulated experiments are best described and expressed. How can we formulate neural simulations in a way that that both researchers and computers understand?

In my lecture I will introduce the main features of NEST. More important than the lecture will be the hands-on tutorial in which you have the opportunity to try and play with NEST. But I also encourage you to seek my assistance outside the lecture and tutorial.

I am a first year PhD student at the Department for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge developing computational models for retinotopic map formation. I come from Macedonia, but I did my undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College in California, in Mathematics. My PhD work provides an interface between experiment and theory, because I work with real data of spontaneous retinal activity and try to explain its role in topographic map formation using computational modelling. At OCNC I would like to learn about theoretical techniques that can be applied to my model to understand how computationally explored parameters can be derived analytically.

I am very excited about meeting everyone! I have heard amazing things about Okinawa and this course, and I am looking forward to experiencing them myself.

Born in Canada to German parents. Ph Dat Oxford with Julian Jack. Postdoc with Bert Sakmann in Heidelberg and then with Philippe Ascher in Paris. Started my own independent la bat University College London in 1997 with the support of a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. Currently Professor of Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at UCL.

Hi, I'm Satoshi Hirose. I'm working on human motor control, utilizing fMRI and psychophysical technique. I hope to be a friend to you all!

Hello, my name is Katri and I'm a first-year Ph.D. student at Tampere University of Technology, Finland. My research is related to modeling of intracellular signal transduction events related to LTD in cerebellar Purkinje cell. For now, I have been concentrating in models of IP3 receptor. In our research group we have a special interest in using and developing stochastic methods for modeling and simulations. I visited Okinawa this spring, so if you have some questions don't hesitate to ask. I look forward meeting you all! PS. Don't forget to take your snorkeling gear with you!

After finishing my degree in theoretical physics, I joined Adrienne Fairhall's lab in the University of Washington where I worked on some problems in single neuron computation. Since last year, I have been working on a cerebellar Purkinje neuron in Erik De Schutter's group at OIST. My primary interest is to understand how a computational function of a single neuron is determined: how can we quantitatively establish a mapping between a neuron's computational property and its physical basis, and how such a map would be modified by changing biophysical parameters? I am interested in extending these questions beyond a single neuron, too. I was an OCNC student myself in 2006, which influenced my decision to move to Okinawa. The course is a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot, make new friends, and enjoy the beautiful nature of South Pacific. I hope you have great time in OCNC 2008!

Hi! My name is Elisabeth Hopp, I am a Diploma student at the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Currently I am particularly interested in perceptual decision making, how it can be described in mathematical terms, and how these computations can be carried out on a neuronal level. I am very much looking forward to exchanging ideas and enjoying the summer with you all in Okinawa!

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, and affiliated with the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center and the Perceptual Expertise Network. My research interests include hemispheric asymmetry in cognitive processes and development of perceptual expertise, using a variety of approaches including computational modeling (in particular connectionist models) and cognitive neuroscience (with behavioral, eye movement, and EEG/ERP measures). I am interested in incorporating neuroanatomical findings into computational models to account for behavioral data.

Hi, I'm a PhD student in Dr. John Bekkers' lab at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra, Australia. My PhD research has involved using cultured autaptic neruons to study presynaptic properties of synaptic transmission. I have a biological background and am eager to learn how this can be combined with more computational approaches. Look forward to meeting you all soon!

Shin Ishii received a BE in 1986, ME in 1988, and PhD in 1997 from the U. Tokyo. He joined Ricoh Co. Ltd. in 1988, and ATR in 1994. He became an associate professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in 1997 and a professor in 2001. Since 2007, he has been a professor in the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, while serving concurrently in NAIST. He is interested in systems neurobiology, machine learning including reinforcement learning and Bayesian learning, and bioinformatics.

This is my fourth time to join this wonderful summer school, OCNC, as a faculty member. The venue is in front of the ocean, and I believe it will be a nice experience for you and myself to learn and study a lot about computational neuroscience in a very interdisciplinary atmosphere.

Hi all! My name is Carl Jackson, and I'm a postdoctoral research fellow in human sensory motor neuroscience in the PRISM lab at the University of Birmingham, working with Chris Miall. My background is in physics, but my PhD and postdoc are in behavioural neuroscience and neuroimaging related to motor control.

I'm interested in how predictive forward models and optimal feedback control can help us to explain the characteristics of human movement. Specifically, I've recently been looking at bimanual movement and on this course I want to try to model neural systems that can explain my behavioural results.

Very much looking forward to meeting people and having three weeks learning interesting science in Okinawa!

I joined Josh Singer's laboratory at Northwestern University in April of last year to study the second synapse in the rod retinal circuitry, the rod bipolar cell -- AII amicrince cell synapse. My study of synaptic properties with josh follows my pre doctoral work with Nelson Spruston which was entirely focused on the intrinsic properties of CA1 pyramidal neurons of the hippocampus. In Dr. Spruston's lab i was able to collaborate with the computational modelers with great success. With this course i hope to be able to bring computational modeling to the Singer lab and the study of the rod bipolar cell -- AII amicrince cell synapse. In my free time i enjoy working in the student machine shop as well as building audio amplifiers.

I am a PhD student with Prof. R Manchanda, IIT Bombay. Our lab is performing computational investigations into the mechanisms of information processing in medium spiny projection neurons in relation to reward processing and learning. I look forward to meet, discuss and learn from people in different areas of neuroscience coming for this course from across the world. Also, this is my first visit to a foreign country.

See you all at Okinawa!

After finishing my studies in Greece, I joined the graduate program in Neuroscience at the University of Texas in the department of Neurobiology and Anatomy. My background is mostly Physics and I am interested in synaptic plasticity. For my research, me and my advisor Dr. Shouval, we followed a bottom to top approach. I started with modeling of simplified molecular mechanisms that contribute in synaptic alterations, studying and developing appropriate tools for exploring more complex reaction-diffusion systems and finally trying to derive abstract learning models. I am very looking forward to meet and discuss with you all at the OCNC Summer School.

Born in 1956 in the American Midwest, Christof Koch grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco, where he graduated from the Lycèe Descartes in 1974. He studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany and was awarded his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1982.

After four years at MIT, Dr. Koch joined Caltech in 1986, where he is the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology. He lives in Pasadena, and loves to run and to climb.

The author of three hundred scientific papers and journal articles, and several books, Dr. Koch studies the biophysics of computation, and the neuronal basis of visual perception, attention, and consciousness. Together with Francis Crick, he is one of the pioneers of the neurobiological approach to consciousness.

Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Goettingen, Germany

Hi!

My name is Birgit and I have the pleasure to be one of the tutors of this year's course! My background is theoretical physics and computational neuroscience. I did my PhD at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) in Freiburg/Germany and I am now affiliated to the Network Dynamics Group at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the BCCN in Goettingen/Germany.

My main research interest is the dynamics of networks of integrate-and-fire neurons in dependence of structural features such as weight distribution and network topology. Especially, I¹m interested in correlations and synchronization phenomena in these systems. The analytical part of my work is concerned with non-linear dynamics, time series analysis, graph theory and random matrix theory. If it comes to computation, I make use of Matlab, NEST, and Mathematica.

Due to my close association with the interdisciplinary Bernstein Centers, I have always interacted with experimenters of the "wet" part of the neurosciences just as well.

As a student I partook in several summer schools, amongst them the Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience in 2005, and an internship at the RIKEN BSI in 2006. It was always a more than nice and helpful experience, both on the professional and the social level!

I'm really looking forward to visit Japan again and meet you all at Okinawa!

Hello! I am a postdoctoral fellow at RIKEN BSI-TOYOTA Collaboration Center. In my PhD, I studied the mechanism for synaptic plasticity, especially STDP, by model simulation. Currently, I¹m working on the development of the data analysis methods for in vivo and in vitro neurophysiological data. I am interested in the functional significance of the dendritic regenerative electrogenesis, such as dendritic spikes, for information processing in noisily physiological microcircuits. Additionally, I want to explore the roles of various types of plasticity in the information processing. I'm looking forward to meeting and discussing with you in OCNC!

Hey folks! My name is Robert Kyle, and I'm a PhD student in the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation at the University of Edinburgh. My research is into how we learn goal-directed behaviours, with a particular focus on the role of dopamine in this process. I'm 2 years into the project now, working with my supervisors David Willshaw and Daniel Durstewitz.

My background is in Theoretical Physics and Cognitive Science, and I still have interests in these areas even though I have since moved to neuroscience. I look forward to meeting all of you and sharing ideas... See you in June!

I am a PhD student at National Brain Research Centre, India. My institute is near New Delhi, which is the capital of India and a short trip away from beautiful Himalayan mountains and the Rajasthan desert.

My research interest is in coding of stimulus location and roughness representation in the somatosensory cortex of monkeys. For this, I use multi-electrode recordings (spikes/LFPs) in anaesthetized and awake-behaving monkeys. I am also interested in cortical (and sub-cortical) plasticity following spinal cord injuries.

I am new to computational modeling and hope to learn lots of new ideas from this workshop. Eventually I want to model the spatio-temporal pattern of spiking activity in the somatosensory cortex following tactile stimulus.

I am looking forward to meeting the diverse group of theoreticians and experimentalists at OCNC2008 and having many stimulating discussions. Also, this is my first trip to Japan. I have been a big fan of many things Japanese (especially Haruki Murakami and Sake). So, can¹t wait to get there!

I obtained my B.S. in Physics in 1984 from Fudan University, Shanghai, and Ph.D. in Physics in 1989 from California Institute of Technology. I was a postdoctoral researcher in Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois USA, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, USA, and Rockefeller University in New York USA. I have been a faculty member in Computer Science in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and was a visiting scientist at various academic institutions. In 1998, I helped to found the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in University College London. Currently, I am a Professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Computer Science in University College London. My research experience throughout the years ranges from areas in high energy physics to neurophysiology and marine biology, with most experience in understanding the brain functions in vision, olfaction, and in nonlinear neural dynamics. In late 90s and early 2000s, I proposed a theory (which is being extensively tested) that the primary visual cortex in the primate brain creates a saliency map to automatically attract visual attention to salient visual locations.

To students in OCNC2008, please feel free to send me emails for more information about the lectures or give your inputs as to what you desire to learn or wish to be taught more. Reading the suggested readings ahead of the lectures is essential if you want more than a superficial absorption of the lectures. To colleagues at Okinawa, I look forward to visiting your labs for the first time and hearing about your latest research.

Hi all. I'm Jussi Lindgren, and I'm interested in transformations that turn photon inputs into perceptual experiences of the surrounding world. In OCNC I hope to learn more about the nuts and bolts used in this process called 'vision'. Lately I've been working on statistical models of natural images and trying to understand the connections between the data statistics and the characteristics of neural machinery. My personal characteristics include liking long walks and bicycling.

Director, Center for Neural Dynamics Physics Department

University of Ottawa

Andre Longtin is native of Montreal, Canada. He received his honours B.Sc. Physics in 1983, and his M.Sc. Physics in 1985 from the Universite de Montreal. His M.Sc. thesis was on Mathematical Models of the Human acoustic Reflex. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from McGill University in 1989. His thesis was a theoretical and experimental study of Nonlinear Oscillations, Noise and Chaos in Neural Delayed Feedback Systems, under the supervision of Michael Mackey and co-supervision of John Milton (Montreal Neurological Institute). He then joined Los Alamos National Laboratory for two years, both as a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow and a Los Alamos Director's Funded Postdoctoral Fellow. He held a joint position in the Theoretical Division T13 (Complex Systems; Doyne Farmer group leader) and the Center for Nonlinear Studies (David Campbell, Director).

He began as assistant professor of Physics in 1992 at the University of Ottawa. He is now Professor since 2002, and cross-appointed to the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine since 2004. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and on the editorial board of Biological Cybernetics (Springer) and Cognitive Neurodynamics (Springer). He directs the Center for Neural Dynamics at the University of Ottawa.

Hello everybody! My name is Michele Mattioni and I'm a Ph.D. student based at the EMBL-EBI in Cambridge, UK. I'm working in computational neurobiology group, headed by Le Novere and I'm developing an accurate model of a medium spiny neuron with compartmental approach. I'm really looking forward to meet you all in Okinawa.

I am a postdoc at Columbia university. My research explores using brain imaging the neural bases of unconscious perceptual processing in humans. I am particularly interested in the influence of unconscious processing on the control of behavior, and I would love to integrate a modeling approach with my experimental work. I look forward to seeing you in Okinawa!

When I was Kyoto University student, I specialized in Neurochemistry (gene identification and characterization). Since I graduated the university, I majored in Neurophysiology (single and multiple units recording) and computational neuroscience (the optimization of movements) in Ph.D. course of Juntendo University. Now, I am especially interested in motor control from the following three points of view. I want to elucidate neural mechanisms of these processing by using both simulation and electrophysiology.

[1]. Optimization: I succeeded in optimizing, namely smoothing, simulated arm movements by our model.

[2]. Decoding of saccades: I estimated saccade timing and direction using neural activities from frontal eye field (FEF) and supplementary eye field (SEF). Comparing 2 areas, before actual saccades SEF is relatively useful, but after saccades FEF overwhelm SEF.

[3]. Movement timing: Neural activities in SEF represent the length of waiting time for saccades.

I've been a postdoc in Jim Surmeier's lab at Northwestern for one year now. My research focuses on dendritic excitability of medium spiny projection neurons of the striatum. My experiments use electrophysiology and 2-photon imaging to examine the mechanisms governing dendritic excitability, and how these mechanisms are altered in Parkinson's disease and contribute to changes in synaptic plasticity. Because striatal projection neuron dendrites are small and not easily accessible to direct electrophysiological measurements, I think being able to make testable models of what may be going on in distal dendrites would be a very helpful tool to learn. I'm looking forward to learning more about this technique, and I can't wait to meet everyone in Okinawa!

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at Columbia University. My lab is interested in visual awareness and we approach the issue using techniques such as fMRI, TMS, and psychophysical studies. Recently, we've also become interested in modeling the brain processes responsible for perceptual decisions in the context of Signal Detection Theory and criterion setting.

I am looking forward to a fun time in Okinawa and meeting all of you.

Hi guys! I'm a Masters Student at Auckland University in New Zealand. My Master's project investigates somatosensory-auditory overlap in the avian song system using both anatomical techniques and multiunit recordings. I'm interested in how these two senses can integrate in non-linear ways to provide abilities such as identification of self-generated sounds.

I'm somewhat a jack-of-all-fields, rather than particularly specialised guy, with an interest spectrum ranging from molecular mechanisms to cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. Most of my interests lie at the systems level, which computational neuroscience compliments very nicely! Looking forward to meeting you all in Okinawa!

I got my undergraduate degree in microbiology from the University of Vienna and my PhD in zoology from the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt (with Wolf Singer). Then I did a post-doc with Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute in La-Jolla. In 2006 I joined OIST and established the Theoretical and Experimental Neurobiology Unit.

Welcome to Okinawa! I hope that during your stay here you will learn a lot about neuroscience, make new friends, see some of the beautiful nature and interesting culture this island has to offer, eat lots of good Japanese food and drink some Awamori. You can sleep when you're dead, but certainly only very little during OCNC!

It's a pleasure for me to come to Okinawa and to attend this course as a tutor. I'm looking forward to meet you all and to accept the challenge to learn and discuss about Computational Neuroscience at such an exciting place.

I have a background in physics and received the doctoral degree in theoretical neuroscience last year in Freiburg, Germany. Currently I live (and work) in Norway.

My scientific work is concerned with the relationship between the structure and dynamics of networks of spiking neurons. I think that the rich dynamical repertoire of these high-dimensional complicated systems is certainly the key to understand brain function. Nevertheless, there are several good reasons to boil things down and to go for simplified descriptions. Currently I'm therefore involved in a project that seeks to derive macroscopic (population) models from microscopic (networks of neurons) models.

My background is physics and information theory. I have been studying synaptic plasticity, information coding, and the self-organization of the brain from theoretical perspectives, hoping that they could provide some unified understanding of our brain circuitry and functions. I am particularly interested in the development of visual cortex and the idea of synaptic plasticity as an optimal learning rule. I hope to see you all on OCNC soon.

I was trained as a theoretical physicist in Moscow, then moved between fields and countries, until finally settling at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, at the Department of Neurobiology.

This will be my first trip to Okinawa school (and to Japan in general), I am looking forward to meeting all the students and the faculty, and to having heating discussion on computational neuroscience -- what is should and should not study, on which level of realism, where it stands, and where it is heading. I am coming from the school of theoretical physics that developed a very specific approach to these issues, but will be happy to hear opposing views and argue about them.

Albert Einstein

My name is Christine Vossen and I am a Ph.D. student in Leo van Hemmen's group for Theoretical Biophysics. Before I came to Munich I studied Mathematics in Heidelberg. I am currently working on concepts of sensory information processing. Therefore I am studying a concrete example -- the auditory system of a lizard -- as well as general concepts of merging senses from different sensory systems. As a scientist, I always try to stay curious. Thus I am looking forward to the conference, to all the interesting people from around the world, to new theories and to new questions.

Xiao-Jing Wang is Professor of Neuroscience, and director of the Swartz Initiative for Theoretical Neurobiology at Yale. He did his undergraduate studies and Ph. D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Brussels, then he changed his field to Computational Neuroscience in 1987. He uses theory and biophysically realistic neural circuit modeling to study cortical dynamics and functions. His interests cover a broad range of topics, including neuronal adaptation at multiple timescales, diversity of inhibitory interneurons, and synchronous network oscillations. The main goal of research in his laboratory is to uncover circuit mechanisms of working memory and decision making in the prefrontal cortex and other cortical areas, in close collaboration with experimentalists. Currently, his lab is pursuing large-scale neural circuit models of spiking neurons, to elucidate general principles and cellular basis of key cognitive processes, as well as their impairments associated with schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

Welcome to the Okinawa Computational Neuroscience Course; I hope you will find the experience rewarding as well as challenging. I expect you to be actively involved in the class, asking questions, participating in discussions, and carrying out projects on interesting topics. If you are from outside of neuroscience, it may be reassuring to know that you are not alone---many people (me included) are from physics, mathematics, engineering and other fields. I hope this summer school will strengthen your resolve to enter the field and stimulate you to think about some big open questions.

My own work is at the interface between neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. Compared to sensory processing and motor behavior, we know relatively little about detailed biophysical and circuit mechanisms of cognitive functions. In my course I hope to show that this is an area of exciting current research and great future promise. I have been teaching computational neuroscience since 1992, at the University of Chicago, Brandeis University and Yale University. I have lectured at various summer schools: Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (USA), Paris (France), Torino and Trieste (Italy), Xylocastro (Greece), Shanghai (China). I am looking forward to participating in this summer school, and to meeting you all in Okinawa.

I am Xu-dong Wang, a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of neural plasticity, Institute of Neuroscience. Learning, memory and the underlying biological mechanism- neural plasticity are within the scope of my interest. I love experiment-based theories and theory-guided experiments. It will be my pleasure to take the opportunity to meet you all during this summer school.

Hi, I'm an experimentalist in neurophysiology, working with Doug Munoz at Queens' University. My interest is arbitrary stimulus-response mapping, our ability to generate any kind of action in response to a sensory event. I take advantage of the saccade eye movement system to understand the neural basis of this ability. My ongoing research focuses on the basal ganglia.

I've been collecting a lot of data by running experiments everyday, but I'm sick of it lately. So this is a great opportunity to run away from experiments and learn some neural computational skills which I've always wanted to since undergrad. I hope to work hard and play hard with you all for three weeks in Okinawa. By the way, I'm Japanese, so I can teach you Japanese if you teach me math.

I'm Oliver, 27 years old and from Freiburg, Germany. I studied physics and my first contact with neuroscience was in my master thesis where I worked on a computational study of synchronization in a HH-type coupled neuronal network. The emphasis in my current PhD work is more experimental. I am working with in-vitro cortical cell cultures on microelectrode arrays. I apply electrical stimulation under varying paradigms to investigate the network's input-output relationships. The goal is to derive fundamental network properties, in terms of e.g. processing and storage capabilities, that can be generalized to other, more realistic neuronal networks.

I am very pleased to participate in OCNC 2008, it is the first time that I visit Japan. I will enjoy meeting and discussing with people from many different countries and backgrounds that all have a common interest in neuroscience. See you soon!

Jeff Wickens complete a medical degree (1982) and PhD (1991), at the University of Otago. He became a faculty member at the University of Otago in 1991 and obtained a personal chair in 2004. In 2007 he was appointed as a principal investigator at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, where he is in the process of establishing the neurobiology research unit. He works on the basal ganglia, using experimental and computational approaches to investigate learning mechanisms and local circuit operations of the striatum.

Since my PhD work on a theory of the striatum I have pursued my ambition to develop a computational theory of information processing in the basal ganglia, one which is faithful to the neurobiology and also able to account for its contribution to purposeful behaviour. I believe that theory has a vital role to play in advancing our understanding of the brain and computational modeling is a powerful tool for bringing theories and experimental results into interaction. This approach is really in its infancy, and in my opinion giant steps still lie ahead of us. There is much work to be done, and courses like this are a great way to accelerate the development of the field. I hope you will find here some of the tools you need to advance this field and fulfill your own theoretical ambitions.

My original background is in theoretical computer science (designing algorithms and computational complexity), and I was/am interested in what the brain computes and how the brain computes it. So, I decided to work in the field of computational neuroscience.

Now, I'm a staff scientist at Lab. for Motor Learning Control, RIKEN Brain Science Institute. I'm interested in cerebellar mechanisms for gain control (how far to move) and timing control (when to move). Currently, I've been developing a large-scale spiking network model of the cerebellum which can control both quantities by a single computational principle. I'm also interested in how motor memory is acquired and consolidated in the cerebellum, specifically, how the learned memory in the cerebellar cortex is transferred to the cerebellar nuclei.

I look forward to seeing you and having three weeks together in Okinawa.

My name is Pierre Yger and I'm a 2nd year PhD student in a neuroscience laboratory close to Paris, kilometers away from Okinawa. In short, my main background is computer science but I'm working close to experimentalists performing intracellular recordings in the cat visual cortex. Since I wanted to work in Artificial Intelligence, I thought too naively : "Why not trying first to understand how the brain works before designing any silly algorithm ?" How naive was I ...

Inspired from their gathered data, I perform large scale simulations of neuronal networks to address more specifically the question of how information may be reliably transmitted and recalled within such chaotic dynamical system. I'm also very interested in plasticity, especially in Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity, and in how such rules can affect the dynamical properties of the network and underly the unsupervised learning achieved during epigenetic development.

I've already attended, last year, to the RIKEN summer internship, spending two months in Tokyo, eating sushis and improving my karaoke skills, so I'm sure that Okinawa will confirm my idea that Japan is a wonderful world.

I'm looking forward to meet all of you there.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Brain Dynamics Lab, Department of Bio and Brain Engineering at KAIST. I earned a BA degree in bio and brain engineering from KAIST in 2006.

The aim of my work is to understand the fundamental mechanisms underpinning the information processing of decision-making and to elucidate the pathophysiology of various neuropsychiatric disorders. My research interests are reward, decision-making, addiction, and nonlinear dynamics, using computational modeling of neural networks and functional neuroimaging including fMRI and EEG. I am very excited to attend the course and hope to gain very positive academic stimulus and advanced knowledge in computational modeling. I also look forward to sharing my study with all of you.