Event
Booz Allen Hamilton Colloquium: "How Our Neurons Code the World: Insights from Signal Processing"
Friday, February 17, 2012
3:00 p.m.
1110 Jeong H. Kim Engineering Bldg.
Carrie Hilmer
301 405 4471
chilmer@umd.edu
Booz Allen Hamilton Distinguished Colloquium in Electrical and Computer Engineering
"How Our Neurons Code the World: Insights from Signal Processing"
Dr. Dmitri Chklovskii
Research Scientist & Group Leader, Janelia Farm Research Campus
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Abstract:
Our sensory organs face the challenge of communicating information about the world to the rest of the brain through a limited bandwidth channel. Because natural stimuli are highly correlated they may be compressed using predictive coding, a strategy developed by engineers more than fifty years ago. Indeed, many known neurobiological observations, such as center-surround receptive fields, can be explained in the predictive coding framework. We demonstrate that a negative feedback circuit commonly found in the brain may implement both linear and non-linear predictive coding allowing us to make non-trivial, testable predictions. Therefore, predictive coding may help formulate a much needed unified theory of sensory processing.
Biography:
Dmitri Chklovskii was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and studied physics and engineering in college. He moved to the US in 1989 and obtained a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT in 1994. After being a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows he made a switch to theoretical neurobiology and was a Sloan Fellow at the Salk Institute. In 1999, he founded a theoretical neuroscience group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor. He moved to Janelia Farm in 2007. His work is highly interdisciplinary applying ideas from electrical engineering, computer science, applied math and physics to reverse engineer the brain.
