Location: IGI-seminar room,
Inffeldgasse 16b/I, 8010 Graz Date: starting from
Oct. 13, 2004 every Wednesday,
2.15 - 3.45 p.m. (extra time slot fridays at 2.15 p.m. for make-up
meetings in January)
Content of the seminar:
We will discuss theoretical methods that are needed for current
research in the areas computational
neuroscience and machine
learning.
Talks:
Schedule of talks:
Nov. 3: possibly Maribel (otherwise Maribel will speek on Nov 24)
Topic:
Theoretical parts of some recent paper by Rajesh Rao
If he sends me sufficiently early a preprint of his paper in the next N
IPS: Hierarchical Bayesian inference in networks of spiking neurons
(Advances in NIPS 17, 2005, to appear), then this might be best.
Otherwise the the talk will be about more theoretical parts of Bayesian
computation in recurrent neural circuits (Neural Computation,
16(1), 1-38, 2004) or Predictive
Coding in the Visual Cortex (Nature Neuroscience, 2(1), 79-87,
1999).
Nov. 24: Thuy
(if Maribel speeks on Nov. 24, then Thuy will move to Jan. 14)
Topic: Theoritical results about Hebbian learning, STDP, and
their relationship.
Suitable would be for example material from ch. 11 of the book by
Gerstner and Kistler, or related papers by Gerstner et al.
Jan. 12: Stefan
Topic:
Theory about interaction of excitation and inhibition in neural
circuits, e.g. from N Fourcaud-Trocmé, D Hansel, C van Vreeswijk
and N Brunel (2003), How
spike generation mechanisms determine the neuronal response to
fluctuating inputs, Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 11628-11640.
N Brunel (2000), Dynamics of sparsely connected networks of excitatory
and inhibitory spiking neurons, Journal of Computational Neuroscience,
8, 183-208
on http://www.neurophys.biomedicale.univ-paris5.fr/~brunel/
Some basic theoretical arguments on that topics can also be found on
pp. 265 of the book by Dayan and Abbot.
Jan. 14: Michael (if
Maribel speeks on Nov. 24 then Michael will move to Feb. 2)
Topic:
Proofs of convergence for Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
(e.g. from ch. 6 of the book D. P. Bertsekas and J. N. Tsitsiklis.
Neuro Dynamic Programming. Athena Scientific, Belmont, Massachusetts,
1996.)
--------------------------------------------
Jan.19: Helmut
Topic:
Balancing at the border of instability by L. Moreau and Eduardo
Sontag, Physical Review E 68(2003): 020901(1-4).
Online on
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~sontag/papers.html
(There is also the opportunity to prove a related result which appears
to be even more relevant for neural systems, where negative feedback
aims at balancing some external excitation of a circuit).
Presentation: [PDF][PPT] Jan. 21: Joshi