In the last week of September, UW hosted the 2015 meeting of the recipients of NSF Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience grants. These awards support theorists working with experimentalists to develop and test theories of brain function. Talks covered topics as diverse as models of sequence learning in hippocampus, network instantiations of neural integrators and deciphering whole-brain representations of natural speech. Plenary speakers were Anne Churchland, from Cold Spring Harbor Labs, describing her work on cortical representations of multisensory integration in decision-making; Surya Ganguli of Stanford University, discussing the computational power of complex synapses; and Jesse Goldberg of Cornell who showed new results on basal ganglia dynamics during songbird learning. The meeting was also an opportunity to learn about new funding opportunities for theory from NSF, NIH and the BRAIN Initiative.
A highlight of the meeting was the final workshop, a lively discussion about what machine learning might be able to tell us about the brain and how studies of the brain can inform machine learning algorithms in the future. Speakers/panelists included UW faculty Emily Fox and Wyeth Bair along with Odelia Schwartz (U. Florida) and two industry researchers, Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Google Seattle) and Greg Corrado (Brains group, Google Mountain View).