Connectionists: Internship in Computation Neuroscience

[Axel HUTT]

Internship in Computational Neuroscience 
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in spring/summer 2008 in Nancy / France.

The Internships Program is open to foreign students from partner
institutions who:
- have completed four to five years of university-level coursework and
who would like to spend a 2- to 6-month internship with an INRIA team
while continuing to prepare their home Engineering School diploma or
Master degree. 
- are doctoral students and wish to acquire specific skills available at
INRIA or enrich their curriculum by staying in a foreign research team
for a short period.


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Topic : 
Multiple types of inhibitory synapses in a neural population model

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LORIA-INRIA in Nancy, France is a research unit in computer science.
Part of the group activity focuses on computational neuroscience and in
particular neural population models for sensory processing. An
internship position is offered to study the effects of multiple time
scales of synapses on the spatio-temporal activity. The model under
study (Hutt et al., Network: Comp.Neur.Syst.14, 351-368 (2003)) assumes
a rate-coding mechanism involving the spatial interaction of the
axo-dendritic system, the population of different types of inhibitory
synapses, e.g. GABAA and GABAB, and delay effects between neurons. An
important application is the transition in general anaesthesia. 
The aim of the project is the extension of a standard neural population
model to two populations of synapses, the stability study of the systems
activity and the resulting statistical properties, such as the
spatio-temporal correlation function and the corresponding power
spectrum. The work is both analytical and numerical. A comparison of the
theoretical results obtained to experimental findings are the final work
step. The working language is English, but knowledge in French is
advantageous.
The ideal candidate should have skills in applied mathematics,especially
in the analytical and numerical treatment of spatially-extended systems.
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For more information on the application procedure please send an email
 to Axel Hutt(axel.hutt at loria.fr) or go to  
http://www-direction.inria.fr/international/PROGRAMMES/internship/index.en.html




-- 
Axel Hutt
Laboratoire lorrain de recherche 
en informatique et ses applications (LORIA)
Équipe CORTEX
Bâtiment C - C046
615, rue du Jardin Botanique
54602 Villers-lès-Nancy Cedex
France
Tel.:+33 (0)3 54 95 85 86
http://www.loria.fr/~huttaxel