The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Center for Studies in Physics and Biology Seminars

Speaker(s)

Ashok Litwin-Kumar, Ph.D., assistant professor, Columbia University

Speaker bio(s)

There is excitement about the use of synaptic wiring diagrams, or connectomes, for modeling neural computation, but there is also concern that the information a connectome provides is not sufficient to meaningfully constrain a model. My group has made efforts to understand the capabilities and limitations of this kind of data. I will describe a new method for identifying symmetries in connectome data that are suggestive of computations involving representations of variables of interest to an animal, such as ring or toroidal attractors. I will also describe a theory we have developed that characterizes the solution spaces of connectome-constrained recurrent networks and predicts when such networks exhibit degeneracies or unique solutions.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., Lower Level Greenberg Building (CRC)

Phone

(212) 327-8636

Sponsor

Melanie Lee
(212) 327-8636
leem@rockefeller.edu