From raphael.ritz at incf.org Tue Mar 1 07:17:28 2011 From: raphael.ritz at incf.org (Raphael Ritz) Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:17:28 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Training in Neuroinformatics - Call for Letters of Intent Message-ID: <4D6CE3D8.8060006@incf.org> [sorry if you receive this through multiple channels] The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF; www.incf.org) is committed to support training in neuroinformatics. INCF now invites applications to run short courses lasting between two and seven days on any aspects of neuroinformatics at a level suitable for PhD students and beyond. The courses should be held in English and open to any researcher interested in neuroinformatics. The INCF offers financial support to successful proposals, which would cover the venue, travel and accommodation costs for a small number of speakers and participants. Financial support from other sources is encouraged. One condition of funding is that the course material be made available publically, through INCF. Courses are envisaged to take place in 2012. The Letter of Intent must include information about 1. Topic 2. Organizers 3. Target audience 4. Course description including justification (maximum 250 words) 5. Dissemination plan 6. Speakers - a preliminary list would be helpful 7. Course duration 8. Proposed dates and location 9. Estimated number of participants 10. Draft budget including the amount to be sought from the INCF The closing date for Letters of Intent is 31st March 2011. Letters should be sent in PDF format per email to training-proposals at incf.org. The authors of the most promising Letters of Intent will be invited by 25th April 2011 to submit a full proposal, with a deadline of 1st August 2011. Informal enquiries should be directed to Raphael Ritz (raphael.ritz at incf.org) on behalf of the INCF Training Committee. http://www.incf.org/documents/training/LoI.pdf Raphael -- Dr. Raphael Ritz Scientific Officer International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Karolinska Institutet Nobels v?g 15 A SE-171 77 Stockholm Sweden Email: raphael.ritz at incf.org Phone: +46 8 524 87017 Fax: +46 8 524 87150 web: www.incf.org From opossumnano at gmail.com Tue Mar 1 08:41:32 2011 From: opossumnano at gmail.com (Tiziano Zito) Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 14:41:32 +0100 (CET) Subject: Connectionists: =?utf-8?q?=5BANN=5D_Summer_School_=22Advanced_Sci?= =?utf-8?q?entific_Programming_in_Python=22_in_St_Andrews=2C_UK?= Message-ID: <20110301134132.7A51D2497F6@mail.bccn-berlin> ?Advanced Scientific Programming in Python ========================================= a Summer School by the G-Node and the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved, only few scientists actually use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques, incorporating theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. New skills will be tested in a real programming project: we will team up to develop an entertaining scientific computer game. We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist. This school is targeted at PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or Mathematica is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python should work through the proposed introductory materials before the course. Date and Location ================= September 11?16, 2011. St Andrews, UK. Preliminary Program =================== Day 0 (Sun Sept 11) ? Best Programming Practices - Agile development & Extreme Programming - Advanced Python: decorators, generators, context managers - Version control with git Day 1 (Mon Sept 12) ? Software Carpentry - Object-oriented programming & design patterns - Test-driven development, unit testing & quality assurance - Debugging, profiling and benchmarking techniques - Programming in teams Day 2 (Tue Sept 13) ? Scientific Tools for Python - Advanced NumPy - The Quest for Speed (intro): Interfacing to C with Cython - Best practices in data visualization Day 3 (Wed Sept 14) ? The Quest for Speed - Writing parallel applications in Python - Programming project Day 4 (Thu Sept 15) ? Efficient Memory Management - When parallelization does not help: the starving CPUs problem - Data serialization: from pickle to databases - Programming project Day 5 (Fri Sept 16) ? Practical Software Development - Programming project - The Pac-Man Tournament Every evening we will have the tutors' consultation hour: Tutors will answer your questions and give suggestions for your own projects. Applications ============ You can apply on-line at http://python.g-node.org Applications must be submitted before May 29, 2011. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 19, 2011. No fee is charged but participants should take care of travel, living, and accommodation expenses. Candidates will be selected on the basis of their profile. Places are limited: acceptance rate in past editions was around 30%. Prerequisites: You are supposed to know the basics of Python to participate in the lectures. Please consult the website for a list of introductory material. Faculty ======= - Francesc Alted, author of PyTables, Castell? de la Plana, Spain - Pietro Berkes, Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, USA - Valentin Haenel, Berlin Institute of Technology and Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Germany - Zbigniew J?drzejewski-Szmek, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Poland - Eilif Muller, The Blue Brain Project, Ecole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne, Switzerland - Emanuele Olivetti, NeuroInformatics Laboratory, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and University of Trento, Italy - Rike-Benjamin Schuppner, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Germany - Bartosz Tele?czuk, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, Germany - Bastian Venthur, Berlin Institute of Technology and Bernstein Focus: Neurotechnology, Germany - Pauli Virtanen, Institute for Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, University of W?rzburg, Germany - Tiziano Zito, Berlin Institute of Technology and Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Germany Organized by Katharina Maria Zeiner and Manuel Spitschan of the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, and by Zbigniew J?drzejewski-Szmek and Tiziano Zito for the German Neuroinformatics Node of the INCF. Website: http://python.g-node.org Contact: python-info at g-node.org From trentin at dii.unisi.it Tue Mar 1 17:05:12 2011 From: trentin at dii.unisi.it (Edmondo Trentin) Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 23:05:12 +0100 (CET) Subject: Connectionists: CFP: "MULTIPLE CLASSIFIERS AND HYBRID LEARNING PARADIGMS" (KES 2011 Invited Session) Message-ID: [Apologies for possible cross-postings] Call for papers "MULTIPLE CLASSIFIERS AND HYBRID LEARNING PARADIGMS" KES 2011 Invited session IS30 12, 13, and 14 September 2011 Kaiserslautern, Germany URL: http://www.dii.unisi.it/~trentin/IS30.html IMPORTANT DATES: ---------------- 30 March, 2011: Submission deadline (in LNCS format) 20 April, 2011: Notification of acceptance 1 May, 2011: Deadline for camera-ready papers (via PROSE) 1 May, 2011: Early Registration Deadline Accepted papers by registered Authors will be included in the KES Proceedings (published by Springer). Extended journal versions of selected papers will be considered afterwards, too. INTRODUCTION: ------------- When facing difficult real-world applications, it is often unlikely that an individual learning paradigm can actually yield the solution sought (in spite of its theoretical generality) without a strong co-operation with other, profoundly different modules building up the overall system. For instance, artificial neural networks are known to be mathematically "universal" machines, but satisfactory solutions to complex tasks can hardly be achieved with a single feed-forward connectionist architecture. Historically, this led to the development of multiple neural network systems, namely mixtures of experts or neural ensembles, taking benefit from the specialization of individual nets over specific regions of the feature space, according to a divide-and-conquer strategy. As an alternative, multiple classifier systems were proposed, aiming at combining models that have different nature (e.g., generalized linear discriminants, parametric probabilistic models, neural nets) or aim (e.g., estimating a discriminant function, or a class-posterior probability, or a likelihood). In other circumstances, like in the case of hybrid hidden Markov model/connectionist approaches, the combination between the underlying paradigms relies on the idea of exploiting certain general properties of one of them (e.g., the capability of modeling the long-term dependencies in HMMs) with the strength of the other to accomplish local, specific tasks that occur within the former (e.g., the capability of flexible, discriminative modeling of the HMM emission probabilities via neural nets). Along a similar direction, hybrid random fields were introduced recently, They combine the overall, general structure of a Markov random field with the optimal fit of conditional probabilities of individual variables given their Markov blanket as obtained via Bayesian networks. Again, maximum echo-state likelihood networks (MESLiN) were proposed for sequence processing, relying on the combination of the reservoir of an echo-state architecture with a parametric model of the probability density function of the states of the reservoir. Strictly related areas concern the integration between symbolic and sub-symbolic learning machines, and the so-called information-fusion. In all these scenarios, researchers are mostly concerned with the development and investigation of plausible, mathematically sound techniques for combining the different learners in a feasible, robust manner (instead of just piling-up the different modules onto one another heuristically). Such research efforts are leading to training algorithms that split properly the original learning problem over the component machines, training the latter ones according to a joint, global criterion which fits the solution of the original, overall problem. AIM OF THE SESSION: -------------------- Aim of this Invited Session is to bring together researchers involved in any area of pattern recognition and machine learning that is related to these issues. Fellow scientists are invited to submit their paper(s) to this Session, according to the guidelines for Authors and the reviewing procedures which hold for the KES Conference hosting this Session. Novel, fresh ideas are particularly welcome (even though in preliminary form), although strong experimental analysis of established approaches to severe real-world tasks is encouraged as well. LIST OF TOPICS: --------------- Topics of interest include (but they are not limited to): - multiple classifiers/regression models; - hybrid hidden Markov models/neural network systems; - hybrid random fields and other hybrid graphical models; - combination of kernel machines and other paradigms; - probabilistic interpretation of neural networks; - learners based on both symbolic and sub-symbolic paradigms; - information fusion; - alternate/mixed induction/deduction learners; - multitask learning; - semi-supervised learning; - hybrid approaches to relational learning and graph/structure processing; - deep architectures which hybridize supervised and unsupervised learning. SUBMISSION: ----------- Page formatting: for formatting information, please refer to the Information for LNCS Authors at http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. Please note that papers should be no longer than 10 pages in LNCS format. Papers longer than this will be subject to an additional page charge. All oral and poster papers must be presented by one of the authors who must register within the KES Early Registration deadline. Please submit your paper through the KES submission system (PROSE), making sure you pick up the IS30 Invited Session item from the menu (NOTE: this item is listed in the "invited Sessions" table, not in the "General Sessions" list). Every paper must have at least one author who has registered for the conference with payment by the Early Registration Deadline for the paper to appear in the proceedings. REVIEW PROCESS: --------------- All submissions will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, significance, soundness and clarity. At least two referees will review each submission independently. PUBLICATION: ------------ All accepted papers (of registered Authors) will be published in the KES2011 Proceedings (LNCS/LNAI, Springer-Verlag). Extended versions of selected papers will be considered for publication in the KES Journal (International Journal of Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Engineering Systems) published by IOS Press, and other selected journals. JOINT EVENT: ------------ We are organizing PSL 2011 (Workshop on Partially Supervised Learning) in Ulm, Germany, on September 8-9, 2011 (the official CFP will be issued shortly), with submission deadline on May 6, 2011. If you are planning to attend KES, please consider taking advantage of the close-range between these events: your submissions to each of them are welcome! SESSION CHAIRS: --------------- Edmondo Trentin (http://www.dii.unisi.it/~trentin/HomePage.html) Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione Universita' di Siena, I-53100 Siena (Italy) E-mail: trentin AT dii DOT unisi DOT it Friedhelm Schwenker (http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/ni/staff/FSchwenker.html) Department of Neural Information Processing University of Ulm, D-89069 Ulm (Germany) E-mail: friedhelm DOT schwenker AT uni-ulm DOT de -------------------------------------------------------------------- Edmondo Trentin, PhD Dip. Ingegneria dell'Informazione, V. Roma 56 - 53100 Siena (Italy) E-mail: trentin at dii.unisi.it Voice: +39-0577-234636 Fax: +39-0577-233602 WWW: http://www.dii.unisi.it/~trentin From p.j.b.hancock at stir.ac.uk Tue Mar 1 17:01:44 2011 From: p.j.b.hancock at stir.ac.uk (Peter Hancock) Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 22:01:44 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Announcing the face research mailing list Message-ID: Dear all, apologies for duplications. Although there's an excellent web site and mailing list for the computer face recognition community, there is no mailing list for those of us conducting research into human face perception that I'm aware of. I've therefore set up a simple mailing list to which I encourage you to subscribe and then post relevant items: new papers, conferences, databases, job/studentship offers etc. I'm very happy for those doing artificial face recognition to join, and to post items that relate to human performance, and especially keen for those who may be attempting modelling of human face perception and cognition to join. Signing on to the list is authorised, but posts by members to the list itself are not moderated. There is a digest option; it'd be great if it got busy enough for that to be worthwhile. http://lists.stir.ac.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/face-research-list Please pass on this message to relevant colleagues and students. Peter Peter Hancock Professor Psychology, School of Natural Sciences University of Stirling FK9 4LA, UK phone 01786 467675 fax 01786 467641 http://www.psychology.stir.ac.uk/staff/phancock -- The Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year 2009/2010 The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110301/899bddf7/attachment.html From fsommer at berkeley.edu Fri Mar 4 20:25:17 2011 From: fsommer at berkeley.edu (Fritz Sommer) Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 17:25:17 -0800 Subject: Connectionists: Berkeley course in mining and modeling of neuroscience data, July 11-22, 2011 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7C649064-A7FC-4404-A739-15262B2B60A3@berkeley.edu> Call for applications: (Apologies for duplicate postings) We invite applicants to this new summer course in "Mining and modeling of neuroscience data" to be held July 11-22 at UC Berkeley. A description of the course is below and also at: http://crcns.org/course Application deadline is April 5. Berkeley summer course in mining and modeling of neuroscience data July 11-22, 2011 Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, UC Berkeley Organizers: Fritz Sommer, Jeff Teeters Scope This course addresses students and researchers with backgrounds in mathematics and computational sciences who are interested in applying their skills toward problems in neuroscience. It will introduce the major open questions of neuroscience and teach the state-of?the-art techniques for analyzing and modeling neuroscience data sets. The course is designed for students at the graduate level and researchers with background in a quantitative field such as engineering, mathematics, physics or computer science who may or may not have a specific neuroscience background. The goal of this summer course is to help researchers find new exciting research areas and at the same time to strengthen quantitative expertise in the field of neuroscience. The course is partially sponsored by the National Science Foundation from a grant supporting activities at CRCNS.org, which hosts a public repository of experimental neuroscience data. Format The course is "hands on" in that it will include exercises in how to use and modify existing software tools and apply them to data sets, such as those available in the CRCNS.org repository. Course Instructors Sonja Gruen, Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine INM-6, Research Center Juelich, Germany and RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako-Shi, Japan Robert Kass, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Jonathan Pillow, University of Texas, Austin Maneesh Sahani, Gatsby Unit, University College London Odelia Schwartz, Albert Einstein College of Medicine Frederic Theunissen, University of California, Berkeley Speakers To complement the main course instruction there will be lectures by other neuroscientists presenting their research using quantitative approaches. These speakers, and their research areas are: Jose Carmena, UC Berkeley: Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) Yang Dan, UC Berkeley: Encoding and processing of visual information in the mammalian brain Walter Freeman, UC Berkeley: Developing dynamical theories of brain function using recordings from high-density electrode arrays Jack Gallant, UC Berkeley: Use of fMRI and other data to understand the human visual system at a quantitative, computational level Mark Goldman, UC Davis: Deducing operation of networks of large numbers of interconnected neurons using single neuron measurements Jennifer Linden, University College London: Structure and function of cortex and sensory systems Bin Yu, UC Berkeley: Statistical machine learning and methodologies involving large data sets Requirements Applicants should be familiar with linear algebra, probability, differential and integral calculus and have some experience using MatLab or other software for performing interactive mathematical computations (such as Python or Mathematica). MatLab is recommended because most exercises will be geared for MatLab. Each student should bring a laptop with the software installed. Cost $800 for tuition. Room and board not included. Financial assistance may be available and must be requested on the application form. Housing Dorm housing is available. The lowest rate is $384 for the entire two weeks per person in a double occupancy room (about $27.50 per night). Details: The room rate is $64 per night or $384 per week (seven consecutive nights) for a single or double occupancy room. Since the price of a double occupancy room is the same if one or two people are in it, sharing the room with someone will reduce the price per person to one half of the above. We will help coordinate sharing of rooms for those who wish to do that. Information about the dorm rooms is at: http://conferenceservices.berkeley.edu/summervis_index.html Food Meals are available in the dorm cafeteria and in local restaurants. They are not included with the course. How to apply To apply, fill out the form online linked from: http://crcns.org/course. The application is done entirely on-line. A curriculum vitae and a letter of recommendation is required. The course is limited to 20 students. Application Deadline Applications must be received by April 5. Notifications of acceptance will be given by the end of April. Payment deadlines If admitted, deposit of $300 must be made by May 9. Remainder payment for the course ($500) is due May 31. If using dorm housing, to guarantee a room, reservations must be made by May 31. After that, reservations may be made on space available basis. Payment for housing is made directly to the housing office when checking in (on July 10). Questions Questions about the course can be sent to course [at] crcns.org. Topics covered Basic approaches: - The problem of neural coding - Spike trains, point processes, and firing rate - Statistical thinking in neuroscience - Theory of model fitting / regularization / hypothesis testing - Bayesian methods - Spike sorting - Estimation of stimulus-response functionals: regression methods, spike-triggered covariance, - Variance analysis of neural response - Estimation of SNR. Coherence Information theoretic approaches: - Information transmission rates and maximally informative dimensions - Scene statistics approaches and neural modeling Techniques for analyzing multiple-unit recordings: - Cross-correlation and JPSTH - Sparse coding/ICA methods, vanilla and methods including statistical models of nonlinear dependencies - Unitary event analysis - Proper surrogates for spike synchrony analysis - Methods for assessing functional connectivity - Advanced topics in generalized linear models - Low-dimensional latent dynamical structure in network activity ? Gaussian process factor analysis and newer approaches ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friedrich T. Sommer, Ph.D. Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute UC Berkeley 575A Evans Hall, MC# 3198 Berkeley, CA 94720-3198 http://redwood.berkeley.edu/wiki/Fritz_Sommer -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110304/d53879de/attachment.html From kkuehnbe at uos.de Fri Mar 4 09:17:59 2011 From: kkuehnbe at uos.de (Kai-Uwe Kuehnberger) Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:17:59 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: ATM Call for Books Proposals Message-ID: <4D70F497.6060102@uos.de> *********************************** ATM ************************** C A L L F O R B O O K S P R O P O S A L S Atlantis Thinking Machines (Studies in Computational Cognition) ISSN: 1877-3273 All books are published in collaboration with Springer http://www.atlantis-press.com/publications/books/atm.html ******************************** Overview ********************** Initially, the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) aimed at constructing 'thinking machines' - that is, computer systems with human-like, domain-independent intelligence. But this task proved more difficult than expected. As the years passed, AI researchers gradually shifted focus to producing AI systems that intelligently approached specific tasks in relatively narrow domains, basing their works on earlier research from classical disciplines like psychology, logics, linguistics, and computer science. During the past few decades however, research in understanding and reproducing human intelligence has expanded from traditional approaches into diverse areas, including disciplines like neurosciences, neuro-informatics, computational linguistics, and - perhaps most importantly - cognitive science. Moreover, new results in research on neural and probabilistic machine learning, dynamical systems, biological processes in and structures of the brain, as well as robotics and large-scale systems are greatly affecting current research in understanding and reproducing human intelligence. Given the great progress made with these new approaches, more and more researchers from multiple disciplines have recognised the necessity of returning to one of the original goals of AI in the early days, namely to build models of domain-independent intelligence. Increasingly, there is a call to focus less on highly specialised 'narrow AI' problem solving systems, and more on confronting the difficult issues involved in creating 'general AI', i.e. domain-independent intelligence modeling both lower and higher cognitive abilities in one comprising framework. This book series publishes books resulting from theoretical research on and reproductions of general AI. Practically this does not mean to abandon classical findings, but this book series intends to focus on the establishment of new theories and paradigms. At the same time, the series aims at exploring multiple scientific angles and methodologies, certainly including results deriving from research in cognitive science, the neurosciences, theoretical and experimental AI, biology and from innovative interdisciplinary methodologies. Research fields covered by the series include: * Cognitive science, incl. cognitive architecture * (Computational) Neuroscience * Robotics and autonomous systems * Recurrent and Neural networks * Learning theories * Reasoning and knowledge representation * Hybrid systems / neuro-symbolic integration * Semantic web, incl. web services, ontologies * Grid computing * Biological systems * (computational) Biology ********************* Scope and Coverage ************************* The series aims at publishing original research monographs, text books and edited volumes. We aim at offering a fast turnaround time so that the volumes in this series will be published in a timely manner. Also, the volumes will be reasonably priced, allowing them to be bought not only by institutional buyers but also by interested individuals, thus exposing the books to the widest possible audience. All books will be published, marketed and sold in collaboration with Springer. The electronic version of the book will be published on SpringerLink and be part of the relevant Springer subject collections. ********************* Editorial Team ********************* Editor-in-Chief: Kai-Uwe K?hnberger, University of Osnabr?ck, Germany. Associate Editors: * Ben Goertzel, Novamente LLC, Rockville MD, USA * Boicho Kokinovn, Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science, Sofia, Bulgaria * Pei Wang, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA * Pascal Hitzler, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA ********************* Prospective Authors/Editors ********************* If you have an idea for an edited or authored text book, lecture notes, conferences' proceedings, monographs, case studies which would fit in this series, we would welcome the opportunity to review your proposal. Each proposal will be reviewed by the Series Editor and/or associate editors with additional reviews from independent reviewers where appropriate. Final decision regarding acceptance/revision/rejection will be based on the reviews and assessment of the publisher, Atlantis Press. ********************* Contact ********************* Kai-Uwe K?hnberger Institute of Cognitive Science University of Osnabr?ck Albrechtstrasse 28, 49076 Osnabr?ck Email: kkuehnbe at uos.de ********************* About Atlantis Press and Springer ********************* Atlantis Press (www.atlantis-press.com ) is a publishing company serving the scientific community by providing scientists with the best infrastructure to get their works published, referenced, read and cited. Atlantis Press adheres to the principles of the Creative Commons. Founded in Paris in 2006, Atlantis Press currently has offices in Paris, Amsterdam and Beijing. Springer (www.springer.com ) is a leading global scientific publisher of books and journals, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. It publishes close to 500 academic and professional society journals. Springer is part of the publishing group Springer Science+Business Media. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 6,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,000 employees. ***************************************************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110304/6d231b9c/attachment-0001.html From matthias.treder at gmail.com Thu Mar 3 15:14:51 2011 From: matthias.treder at gmail.com (Matthias Treder) Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2011 21:14:51 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: =?windows-1252?q?SAN_2011_workshop_=93Gaze-indepe?= =?windows-1252?q?ndent_brain-computer_interfaces=94?= Message-ID: *Call for abstracts*: SAN 2011 workshop ?Gaze-independent brain-computer interfaces? Abstract *deadline*: Sunday*, 20**th** of March 2011.* All accepted abstracts will be published in *Neuroscience Letters*. Society of Applied Neurosciences 5-8 May 2011 Thessaloniki, Greece *http://www.san2011.org/* You are cordially invited to make a contribution to the workshop entitled ?Gaze-independent brain-computer interfaces?, held on May 7 at the SAN 2011 conference. The principal aim of research into brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is to restore motor ability and communication in patients suffering from loss of voluntary muscle control. The fostering of BCI research in the past decade has lead to substantial progress at different strands of BCI research and it has lead to the exploitation of new experimental paradigms, advances in signal processing and classification techniques, and the succesful implementation of BCIs in patients' environments. Recently, the issue of gaze (in)dependence of BCI systems is receiving growing attention in the BCI community. Independence of eye gaze and other muscle-based input signals is a crucial instrument for establishing a unique niche for BCIs in neurorehabilitation research, beyond conventional assistive technologies that rely on muscle-based physiological signals (such as eye movements and EMG). The goal of the present workshop is to bring together different strands of research addressing the (in)dependence of BCIs of eye gaze and other muscle-based physiological signals, and the robustification of present-day BCIs by advances in machine learning and signal processing. To this end, we welcome empirical, theoretical, and methodological accounts on the following topics: * Machine learning and signal processing for BCI * BCIs independent of eye gaze * BCIs based on non-visual (eg, tactile, auditory) sensory modalities * Integration of multiple sensory modalities * Innovative BCI paradigms * Comparative studies comparing BCIs with conventional assistive technology (eg, eyetrackers) * Evaluation of existing BCIs in clinical studies * Neurophysiological basis of gaze-independent BCIs * BCI switches To contribute, please follow the instructions for oral submissions on the SAN homepage (*http://www.san2011.org/*) and prepend 'BCI symposium: ' to the title of your abstract. Looking forward to meeting you in Thessaloniki! The Organization Committee -- Matthias S. Treder, PhD Berlin Institute of Technology Machine Learning Laboratory Franklinstr. 28/29 10587 Berlin Germany Phone: +49 (0)30 314 28681 Fax: +49 (0)30 - 314 78622 Website: http://www.mtreder.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110303/ae659d0f/attachment.html From retienne at jhu.edu Wed Mar 2 10:22:23 2011 From: retienne at jhu.edu (retienne) Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:22:23 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: 2011 Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Workshop: Applicants Deadline March 15th, 2011 In-Reply-To: <4CFFB291.8030909@jhu.edu> References: <4397BD8D-0665-4A95-9FFB-3641C4EF0A5B@gmail.com> <4CFFB032.4030207@ini.phys.ethz.ch> <4CFFB291.8030909@jhu.edu> Message-ID: <4D6E60AF.3070505@jhu.edu> *2011 Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop / Telluride, Colorado, June 26-July 16, 2011/* *CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Deadline is March 15th, 2011* NEUROMORPHIC COGNITION ENGINEERING WORKSHOP www.ine-web.org Sunday June 26th - Saturday July 16th, 2011, Telluride, Colorado We invite applications for a three-week summer workshop that will be held in Telluride, Colorado from Sunday June 26th - Saturday July 16th, 2011. The application deadline is *Tuesday, March 15th* and application instructions are described at the bottom of this document. The 2011 Workshop and Summer School on Neuromorphic Engineering is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Institute of Neuromorphic Engineering, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Institute for Neuroinformatics - University and ETH Zurich, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Maryland - College Park, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University, University of Sydney, University of Florida - Gainesville and the Salk Institute. Directors: Ralph Etienne-Cummings, Johns Hopkins University Timothy Horiuchi, University of Maryland, College Park Tobi Delbruck, Institute for Neuroinformatics, Zurich Workshop Advisory Board: Andreas ANDREOU (The Johns Hopkins University) Andre van SCHAIK (University Western Sydney) Avis COHEN (University of Maryland) Barbara SHINN-CUNNINGHAM (Boston University) Giacomo INDIVERI (Institute of Neuroinformatics, UNI/ETH Zurich, Switzerland) Jonathan TAPSON (University Western Sydney and University of Cape Town) Paul HASLER (Georgia Institute of Technology) Rodney DOUGLAS (Institute of Neuroinformatics, UNI/ETH Zurich, Switzerland) Shihab SHAMMA (University of Maryland) Malcolm SLANEY (Yahoo Research) Previous year workshop can be found at: http://ine-web.org/workshops/workshops-overview/index.html and last year's wiki is https://neuromorphs.net/nm/wiki/2010 . GOALS: Neuromorphic engineers design and fabricate artificial neural systems whose organizing principles are based on those of biological nervous systems. Over the past 16 years, this research community has focused on the understanding of low-level sensory processing and systems infrastructure; efforts are now expanding to apply this knowledge and infrastructure to addressing higher-level problems in perception, cognition, and learning. In this 3-week intensive workshop and through the Institute for Neuromorphic Engineering (INE), the mission is to promote interaction between senior and junior researchers; to educate new members of the community; to introduce new enabling fields and applications to the community; to promote on-going collaborative activities emerging from the Workshop, and to promote a self-sustaining research field. FORMAT: The three week summer workshop will include background lectures on systems and cognitive neuroscience (in particular sensory processing, learning and memory, motor systems and attention), practical tutorials on analog VLSI design, mobile robots, hands-on projects, and special interest groups. Participants are required to take part and possibly complete at least one of the projects proposed. They are furthermore encouraged to become involved in as many of the other activities proposed as interest and time allow. There will be two lectures in the morning that cover issues that are important to the community in general. Because of the diverse range of backgrounds among the participants, some of these lectures will be tutorials, rather than detailed reports of current research. These lectures will be given by invited speakers. Projects and interest groups meet in the late afternoons, and after dinner. In the early afternoon there will be tutorials on a wide spectrum of topics, including analog VLSI, mobile robotics, auditory systems, central-pattern-generators, selective attention mechanisms, cognitive systems, etc. 2011 TOPIC AREAS: "A Cognitive Robot Detecting Objects using Sound, Language, and Vision" (Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos, & Andreas Andreou) "Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Methods for Guided Reinforcement Learning" (John Harris and David Noelle) "Attention-Driven Scene Analysis" (Julio Martinez and Mounya Elhilali) "From Single Cells to Cognition in Software and Hardware" (Kwabena Boahen and Chris Eliasmith) In addition, there will be a number of ad-hoc tutorials, demonstrations, and discussion groups that will focus on important issues in the research community. Terry Sejnowski -- Computational Neuroscience (invitational mini-workshop) LOCATION AND ARRANGEMENTS: The summer school will take place in the small town of Telluride, 9000 feet high in southwest Colorado, about 6 hours drive away from Denver (350 miles). Great Lakes Aviation and America West Express airlines provide daily flights directly into Telluride. All facilities within the beautifully renovated public school building are fully accessible to participants with disabilities. Participants will be housed in ski condominiums, within walking distance of the school. Participants are expected to share condominiums. The workshop is intended to be very informal and hands-on. Participants are not required to have had previous experience in analog VLSI circuit design, computational or machine vision, systems level neurophysiology or modeling the brain at the systems level. However, we strongly encourage active researchers with relevant backgrounds from academia, industry and national laboratories to apply, in particular if they are prepared to work on specific projects, talk about their own work or bring demonstrations to Telluride (e.g. robots, chips, software). Wireless internet access will be provided. Technical staff present throughout the workshops will assist with software and hardware issues. We will have a network of PCs running LINUX and Microsoft Windows for the workshop projects. We encourage participants to bring along their personal laptop. No cars are required. Given the small size of the town, we recommend that you do not rent a car. Bring hiking boots, warm clothes, rain gear, and a backpack, since Telluride is surrounded by beautiful mountains. Unless otherwise arranged with one of the organizers, we expect participants to stay for the entire duration of this three week workshop. ------ FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS: ------ Notification of acceptances will be mailed out around the end of March 2011. The Workshop covers all your accommodations and facilities costs. You are responsible for your own travel to the Workshop. For expenses not covered by federal funds, a Workshop registration fee is required. The fee is $600 per participant, however, due to the difference in travel cost, we offer a discount to participants outside of the US, Canada and Mexico. European registration fees will be reduced to $350; non-US/non-European registration fees will be reduced to $200. The cost of a shared condominium will be covered for all academic participants but upgrades to a private room will cost extra. Participants from National Laboratories and Industry are expected to pay for these condominiums. ------ HOW TO APPLY: ------- Applicants should be at the level of graduate students or above (i.e. postdoctoral fellows, faculty, research and engineering staff and the equivalent positions in industry and national laboratories). We actively encourage women and minority candidates to apply. Anyone interested in proposing or discussing specific projects should contact the appropriate topic leaders directly. The application website is (after February 10th, 2011): http://ine-web.org/telluride-conference-2011/apply-info Application information needed: * contact email address * First name, Last name, Affiliation, valid e-mail address. * Curriculum Vitae (a short version, please). * One page summary of background and interests relevant to the workshop, including possible ideas for workshop projects. Please indicate which topic areas you would most likely join. * Two letters of recommendation (uploaded directly by references). The application deadline is March 15, 2011. Applicants will be notified by e-mail. 10 February, 2011 - Applications accepted on website 15 March, 2011 - Applications Due end of March - Notification of Acceptance (v9.2.2011b) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110302/6268b204/attachment-0001.html From choe at cs.tamu.edu Mon Mar 7 11:37:15 2011 From: choe at cs.tamu.edu (Yoonsuck Choe) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 10:37:15 -0600 (CST) Subject: Connectionists: IJCNN 2011 neuroscience abstracts: due 3/10 Message-ID: IJCNN 2011 Neuroscience Abstracts: due by March 10, 2011. 2011 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2011) San Jose, California July 31 - August 5, 2011 IJCNN 2011 Abstract Submission is Still Open ---------------------------------------------------------- IJCNN will continue to accept abstracts for the special track in areas related to computational neuroscience and cognitive systems until March 10, 2011. For details on submission and rules for abstracts, please see: http://www.ijcnn2011.org/submission.php Areas of interest for abstracts include but are not limited to: - Biological neural networks - theory & models. - Computational neuroscience. - Neurocognitive networks. - Computational models of perception, cognition and behavior. - Models of learning and memory. - Models of social cognition and behavior. - Brain-machine interfaces and neural prostheses. - Brain-inspired cognitive models. - Embodied cognitive systems. - Neuroinformatics. - Neuroevolution and development. - Models of neurological diseases and treatments. - Systems and computational biology Accepted abstracts will be guaranteed a poster presentation at the conference. The authors of a limited number of exceptionally high-quality abstracts will be invited to give oral presentations, and possibly to submit full papers for the IJCNN 2011 special issue of the Elsevier journal, Neural Networks. Unlike full papers, abstracts will receive only limited review to ensure their appropriateness for IJCNN and consistency with the focus areas of the abstracts program. Abstracts will not be included in the conference proceedings, but will be published on-line by the International Neural Network Society along with abstracts for all presentations at IJCNN 2011. In addition to contributed talks and posters, special sessions, panels, competitions, tutorials and workshops, IJCNN 2011 will feature: - Plenary talks by Michael Arbib, Leon Glass, Dharmendra Modha, Andrew Ng, Stefan Schaal, Juergen Schmidhuber - with more invited speakers to be confirmed. - A special, day-long symposium called "From Brains to Machines" with invited talks by leading researchers (sponsored by the National Science Foundation). Please contact the Program Chair, Hava Siegelmann (ijcnn2011 at inns-conf.org) or the General Chair, Ali Minai (Ali.Minai at uc.edu) if you need further information. From jonathan.touboul at gmail.com Mon Mar 7 09:12:03 2011 From: jonathan.touboul at gmail.com (Jonathan Touboul) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 15:12:03 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral positions in mathematical neuroscience Message-ID: <1EAC1B98-3C67-4283-A27E-446B13460DAF@gmail.com> Mathematical Neuroscience Group, CIRB - Coll?ge de France (Paris) NeuroMathComp Laboratory, INRIA Paris Postdoctoral Associate in Mathematical Neuroscience Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position in the future Mathematical Neuroscience Team at the Coll?ge de France (Paris) and in the NeuroMathComp Project (INRIA/ ENS Paris), on the exciting subject of the application of mathematics (stochastic processes, measure theory, PDEs and dynamical systems) to neurosciences, in particular for the understanding of single neuron models and collective dynamics in stochastic nonlinear neural networks models. Detailed subjects can be found on the INRIA webpage: Non-smooth dynamical Systems http://www.inria.fr/institut/recrutement-metiers/offres/post-doc/campagne-2011/(view)/details.html?id=PGTFK026203F3VBQB6G68LONZ&LOV5=4508&LG=FR&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=4882&nPostingTargetID=9846&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=19 Stochastic Nonlinear Dynamical systems http://www.inria.fr/institut/recrutement-metiers/offres/post-doc/campagne-2011/(view)/details.html?id=PGTFK026203F3VBQB6G68LONZ&LOV5=4508&LG=FR&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=4886&nPostingTargetID=9850&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=19 Propagation of chaos http://www.inria.fr/institut/recrutement-metiers/offres/post-doc/campagne-2011/(view)/details.html?id=PGTFK026203F3VBQB6G68LONZ&LOV5=4508&LG=FR&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=4888&nPostingTargetID=9852&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=19 First hitting times of stochastic processes and Neuroscience http://www.inria.fr/institut/recrutement-metiers/offres/post-doc/campagne-2011/(view)/details.html?id=PGTFK026203F3VBQB6G68LONZ&LOV5=4508&LG=FR&Resultsperpage=20&nPostingID=4884&nPostingTargetID=9848&option=52&sort=DESC&nDepartmentID=19 The post is funded for one year renewable, and is accessible to young doctors (or future doctors) that defended their thesis within one year. The net salary 2138 euros, and includes benefits and social security. Applicants should have a strong background in mathematics, either in stochastic processes, dynamical systems or PDEs. Programing skills will be appreciated. interested applicants should provide a recent CV and relevant publications to jonathan.touboul at inria.fr. The postdoc will take place in the historic building of the Coll?ge de France, very well located in the quartier latin of Paris, in close relationship with different high level institutions (ENS Paris, Institut Curie, Coll?ge de France). The scientific life in Paris is very exciting and lively. -- Jonathan Touboul, PhD NeuroMathComp Laboratory, INRIA/ ENS Paris 23 avenue d'Italie 75013 Paris Phone: (+33) 1 39 63 57 10 http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Jonathan.Touboul/ -- Jonathan Touboul, PhD NeuroMathComp Laboratory, INRIA/ ENS Paris 23 avenue d'Italie 75013 Paris Phone: (+33) 1 39 63 57 10 http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Jonathan.Touboul/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110307/b7a4a392/attachment.html From paul.cisek at umontreal.ca Mon Mar 7 15:41:35 2011 From: paul.cisek at umontreal.ca (Paul Cisek) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 15:41:35 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Graduate studentship in cognitive neuroscience of decision-making Message-ID: <8C4059F0926041D0889CE3C1CFFAA2FD@Homunculus> Title: Graduate studentship in decision-making: Dept. of physiology, University of Montr?al, laboratory of Paul Cisek. Applications are invited for a master's or doctoral studentship in cognitive neuroscience. The successful applicant will join a research group studying the cerebral cortical mechanisms of decision-making in humans and non-human primates using a combination of computational and experimental techniques. Research in our laboratory involves computational models of the nervous system as well as behavioral experiments, transcranial magnetic stimulation, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and multi-electrode recording from the cerebral cortex. Depending on the applicant's qualifications and interests, they will help to design and conduct behavioral and neurophysiological experiments, analyze data, develop theoretical models of neural systems, prepare manuscripts for publication, and participate in international conferences. See www.cisek.org/pavel for information on current projects and a list of sample publications. While students with a strong background in mathematics, computer science, or biological sciences are particularly encouraged to apply, all motivated students with an interest in understanding the brain will be considered. The successful applicant will receive a competitive salary in accordance with university guidelines. For further information, please contact Dr. Paul Cisek (paul.cisek at umontreal.ca). Applicants are asked to submit a curriculum vita, a transcript of previous studies, and the names and contact information of two references, to: Dr. Paul Cisek Department of physiology University of Montr?al C.P. 6128 Succursale Centre-ville Montr?al, QC H3C 3J7, CANADA Phone : 514-343-6111 x4355 Web : www.cisek.org/pavel email: paul.cisek at umontreal.ca Applications will be accepted until the position is filled, with an emphasis on applications received before April 8, 2011. --------------- Montr?al is consistently rated as one of the world's most livable cities and has been called "Canada's Cultural Capital". It has the highest number of university students per capita in the entire continent. More than 17,000 foreign students from some 150 countries benefit from among the lowest tuition fees in North America. Compared to other cities of similar stature, the cost of living in Montr?al is very reasonable, particularly in terms of housing. Montr?al has a vibrant neuroscience community spanning four major universities (University of Montr?al, McGill University, Concordia University, and the University of Qu?bec at Montr?al) and the Montr?al Neurological Institute. The University of Montr?al, with its two affiliated schools, the ?cole Polytechnique and the HEC Montr?al, is the largest university in Qu?bec and the second largest in Canada, with over 55,000 students from around the world and some 10,000 employees. Deeply rooted in Montr?al and dedicated to its international mission, the Universit? de Montr?al is one of the top universities in the French-speaking world. The University of Montr?al is a French-speaking institution, and most of the courses are given in French. However, the master's or PhD thesis can be written in either French or English. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110307/f96b24ee/attachment-0001.html From emmanuel.vincent at inria.fr Tue Mar 8 18:28:35 2011 From: emmanuel.vincent at inria.fr (Emmanuel Vincent) Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:28:35 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Last call: First International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME 2011) Message-ID: <4D76BBA3.4030002@inria.fr> ---------------------------------------------- First International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME 2011) in conjunction with Interspeech 2011 September 1st, 2011, Florence, Italy http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/workshop ---------------------------------------------- Important Dates: * Deadline for submission of papers: April 14th, 2011 * Notification of acceptance: June 2nd, 2011 * Final version: June 14th, 2011 * Workshop: September 1st, 2011 Overview: CHiME 2011 is an ISCA-approved satellite workshop of Interspeech 2011 that will consider the challenge of developing machine listening applications for operation in multisource environments, i.e. real-world conditions with acoustic clutter, where the number and nature of the sound sources is unknown and changing over time. CHiME will bring together researchers from a broad range of disciplines (computational hearing, blind source separation, speech recognition, machine learning) to discuss novel and established approaches to this problem. The cross-fertilisation of ideas will foster fresh approaches that efficiently combine the complementary strengths of each research field. The workshop will also be hosting the PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge. This is a binaural, multisource speech separation and recognition competition supported by the EU PASCAL network and the UK EPSRC. If you wish to participate, please visit the Challenge website (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/challenge.html). Call for Papers: We invite original submissions for oral or poster presentation during the workshop. Relevant research topics include (but are not limited to), * automatic speech recognition in multisource environments, * acoustic event detection in multisource environments, * sound source detection and tracking in multisource environments, * music information retrieval in multisource environments, * sound source separation or enhancement in multisource environments, * robust feature extraction and classification in multisource environments, * scene analysis and understanding for multisource environments. Abstracts or full-papers are to be submitted by 14th April. After the workshop participants will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to a peer-reviewed special issue of the journal "Computer Speech and Language" on the theme of Multisource Environments. Organising Committee: Dr Jon Barker, University of Sheffield, UK Dr Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA Rennes, France Prof. Dan Ellis, Columbia University, USA Prof. Phil Green, University of Sheffield, UK Dr. John Hershey, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, USA Prof. Walter Kellermann, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany Prof. Hiroshi Okuno, Kyoto University, Japan From gpipa at uos.de Tue Mar 8 09:24:31 2011 From: gpipa at uos.de (Prof. Dr. Gordon Pipa) Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 15:24:31 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Workshop announcement: 1st Osnabrueck Computational Cognition Alliance Meeting (OCCAM 2011) on "Natural Computation in Hierarchies" - Deadline 30th of April Message-ID: <06a301cbdd9c$8ae9b5c0$a0bd2140$@de> Workshop announcement: (Apologies for duplicate postings) Dear Colleague, we would like to invite you to register for the 1st Osnabr?ck Computational Cognition Alliance Meeting (OCCAM 2011) on "Natural Computation in Hierarchies". The workshop will take place in Osnabr?ck, Germany, from the 22nd to the 24th June 2011 and will be hosted by the Institute of Cognitive Science (University of Osnabr?ck). Details can be found below and on the following webpage: http://www.occam-os.de Registration is open until April 30th, 2011 (first come first served). The registration fee is 100,- Euros. This fee covers the workshop attendance incl. coffee and lunch breaks as well as 2 dinners (buffet on 22nd June and conference dinner on 24th June), but not accommodation. There will also be a poster session (http://www.occam-os.de/callforposters.html) where conference participants will have the opportunity to present their work. Furthermore, guided tours will help making these contributions highly visible. The goal of this workshop is to foster our understanding of mechanisms and principles of information processing in self-organized hierarchical systems. Our knowledge of self-organized information processing in hierarchical systems is still very limited despite being a focus of research for many years. This workshop aims at assembling the latest results from various research branches in order to combine them into a broader and more comprehensive picture of the state of the art in hierarchical systems. The workshop will concentrate on three complementary major topics: 1. Coding and representation of information in hierarchical systems 2. Adaptation, self-organization and learning in hierarchical systems 3. Complex systems, networks and their dynamics These three topics will consequently lead to the ultimate question of how information is processed in natural hierarchical systems. A central aspect of the workshop is to elucidate principles of communication between different brain modules. We believe that this is important because large scale interactions in the brain are presumably self-organized. Since the visual and the motor system are the systems that we know best, the workshop will naturally focus on these two. Confirmed speakers are: ? Sophie Den?ve ? J?zsef Fiser ? Claus Hilgetag ? Herbert Jaeger ? James Kilner ? Konrad K?rding ? Frank Pasemann ? Peggy Seri?s ? Fritz Sommer ? Shimon Ullman ? Paul Verschure ? Angela Yu ? Tim Kietzmann ? Johannes Schumacher ? Niklas Wilming Best regards, Frank J?kel, Peter K?nig, Gordon Pipa (Organizing committee) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Professor and Chair of the Neuroinformatics Department Dr. rer. nat. Gordon Pipa Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrueck Albrechtstr. 28, 49069 Osnabrueck, Germany tel. +49 (0) 541-969-2277 fax (private). +49 (0) 1803 551839222 e-mail: gpipa at uos.de webpage: http://www.ni.uos.de Assistant and Secretary: Anna Jungeilges Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrueck Albrechtstr. 28, 49069 Osnabrueck, Germany tel. +49 (0) 541 969-2390 fax +49 (0) 541 969-2246 e-mail: office at ni.uos.de -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110308/17cb9a08/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 5881 bytes Desc: not available Url : https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110308/17cb9a08/smime-0001.bin From jbednar at inf.ed.ac.uk Wed Mar 9 19:03:52 2011 From: jbednar at inf.ed.ac.uk (James A. Bednar) Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:03:52 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: 15 PhD studentships in Neuroinformatics and Computational Neuroscience Message-ID: <19832.5480.965250.493287@lodestar.inf.ed.ac.uk> UPDATE: Deadline extended to March 31st, 2011 2011-2012 applications for fully-funded PhD studentships at the University of Edinburgh Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) in Neuroinformatics and Computational Neuroscience are now being considered. The DTC is a world-class centre for research at the interface between neuroscience and the engineering, computational, and physical sciences. Our four-year programme is ideal for students with strong computational and analytical skills who want to employ cutting-edge methodology to advance research in neuroscience and related fields, or to apply ideas from neuroscience to computational problems. The first year consists of courses in neuroscience and informatics, as well as lab projects. This is followed by a three-year PhD project done in collaboration with one of the many departments and institutes affiliated with the DTC. Current DTC PhD topics fall into five main areas: * Computational neuroscience: Using analytical and computational models, potentially supplemented with experiments, to gain quantitative understanding of the nervous system. Many projects focus on the development and function of sensory and motor systems in animals, including neural coding, learning, and memory. * Biomedical imaging algorithms and tools: Using advanced data analysis techniques, such as machine learning and Bayesian approaches, for imaging-based diagnosis and research. * Cognitive science: Studying human cognitive processes and analysing them in computational terms. * Neuromorphic engineering: Using insights from neuroscience to help build better hardware, such as neuromorphic VLSI circuits and robots that perform robustly under natural conditions. * Software systems and applications: Using discoveries from neuroscience to develop software that can handle real-world data, such as video, audio, or speech. Other related areas of research will also be considered. Edinburgh has a large, world-class research community in these areas and leads the UK in creating a coherent programme in neuroinformatics and computational neuroscience. Edinburgh has often been voted 'best place to live in Britain', and has many exciting cultural and student activities. Students with a strong background in computer science, mathematics, physics, or engineering are particularly encouraged to apply. Highly motivated students with other backgrounds will also be considered. 15 full studentships (including stipend of 14,082-16,870 UK pounds/year) are available to permanent UK residents or other EU citizens who have been residing in the UK for the past three years (e.g. for education); see the web site (below) for full details. Other applicants can be accepted if they provide their own funding, typically via a scholarship from their country of origin. Further information and application forms can be obtained from: http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/dtc For full consideration for entry in September 2011, the deadline for complete applications is March 31st, 2011. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. From k.gurney at sheffield.ac.uk Wed Mar 9 11:18:21 2011 From: k.gurney at sheffield.ac.uk (Kevin Gurney) Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:18:21 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: New MSc Course Message-ID: <4D77A84D.6060006@shef.ac.uk> The University of Sheffield, UK, has launched a new MSc in Computational Intelligence to start in September 2011. Computational intelligence is an exciting area that brings together research in engineering, computing and neuroscience. Recent advances in how the brain works, and applications such as biologically inspired robotics, have occurred, in large part, due to a greater understanding of computational intelligence as a unified discipline. This new MSc provides the multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills to meet the demand for experts in computational intelligence. The MSc will cover a mixture of modules in computational neuroscience, machine learning, neural networks, modelling and simulation of natural systems, multi-sensor data fusion, adaptive intelligence and robotics. Training in research skills will also be provided and students will undertake a substantial individual project which will allow them to specialise even further. For more information or to apply please go to http://shef.ac.uk/acse/prospectivepg/masters/compintel.html or contact Dr Tony Dodd t.j.dodd at shef.ac.uk +44 (0)114 222 5636 -- sent by Kevin Gurney, PhD Professor of Computational Neuroscience Adaptive Behaviour Research Group Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, S10 2TP, UK http://www.abrg.group.shef.ac.uk/ ------------- From latorre at lsi.uji.es Wed Mar 9 08:31:07 2011 From: latorre at lsi.uji.es (Pedro Latorre Carmona) Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:31:07 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Papers ICPRAM 2012 Message-ID: <20110309143107.17255dzo1hv1g6cb@webmail.uji.es> CALL FOR PAPERS ********************************************************************* 2012 International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM2012) February 6-8, 2012 Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal http://www.icpram.org ********************************************************************* ICPRAM (1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods) has an open call for papers, whose deadline is set for July 26, 2011. We hope you can participate in this conference by submitting a paper reflecting your current research in any of the following tracks: 1. Theory and Methods 2. Applications ICPRAM 2012 will be held in Algarve, Portugal next year, on February 6-8, 2012. It will be sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC) in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning (PASCAL2) and IEEE Signal Processing Society, and technically co-sponsored by AERFAI and APRP. INSTICC is member of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). ICPRAM would like to become a major point of contact between researchers, engineers and practitioners on the areas of Pattern Recognition, both from theoretical and application perspectives. Contributions describing applications of Pattern Recognition techniques to real-world problems, interdisciplinary research, experimental and/or theoretical studies yielding new insights that advance Pattern Recognition methods are especially encouraged. The conference program features a number of Keynote Lectures to be delivered by distinguished world-class researchers, including those listed below. The proceedings of ICPRAM will be submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index, INSPEC, DBLP and EI. All accepted papers (full, short and posters) will be published in the conference proceedings, under an ISBN reference, on paper and on CD-ROM support. A short list of presented papers will be selected so that revised and extended versions of these papers will be published by Springer-Verlag in a AISC Series book. Top selected papers in specific areas of interest will be published as a special issue in the Neurocomputing Journal. Best paper awards will be distributed during the conference closing session=2E Please check the website for further information (http://icpram.org/best_paper_awards.asp). All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SciTePress Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/). Workshops and special sessions are also invited. If you wish to propose workshop or a special session, for example based on the results of a specific research project, please contact the secretariat. Workshop chairs and Special Session chairs will benefit from logistics support and other types of support, including secretariat and financial support, to facilitate the development of a valid idea. Please check further details at the ICPRAM conference website(http://icpram.org). Should you have any question please don't hesitate contacting me. ICPRAM 2012 will be held in conjunction with ICAART 2012 (http://www.icaart.org/home.asp) in Algarve, Portugal next year, on February 6-8, 2012. Registration to ICPRAM will enable free access to the ICAART conference (as a non-speaker). ICPRAM website: http://icpram.org IMPORTANT DATES: Conference date: 6-8 February, 2012 Regular Paper Submission: July 26, 2011 Authors Notification: October 6, 2011 Final Regular Paper Submission and Registration: October 26, 2011 TECHNICALLY CO-SPONSORED BY - AERFAI (Asociacion Espanola de Reconocimiento de Formas y Analisis de Imagen) - APRP (Associacao Portuguesa de Reconhecimento de Padroes) IN COOPERATION WITH - AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) - PASCAL2 (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning) Excellence Network - IEEE Signal Processing Society - Machine Learning For Signal Processing Technical Committee of IEEE CONFERENCE TRACKS: 1. Theory and Methods 2. Applications TRACK 1: Theory and Methods - Exact and Approximate Inference - Density Estimation - Bayesian Models - Gaussian Processes - Model Selection - Graphical and Graph-based Models - Missing Data - Ensemble Methods - Neural Networks - Kernel Methods - Large Margin Methods - Classification - Regression - Sparsity - Feature Selection and Extraction - Spectral Methods - Embedding and Manifold Learning - Similarity and Distance Learning - Matrix Factorization - Clustering - ICA, PCA, CCA and other Linear Models - Fuzzy Logic - Active Learning - Cost-sensitive Learning - Incremental Learning - On-line Learning - Structured Learning - Multi-agent Learning - Multi-instance Learning - Reinforcement Learning - Instance-based Learning - Knowledge Acquisition and Representation - Meta Learning - Multi-strategy Learning - Case-based Reasoning - Inductive Learning - Computational Learning Theory - Cooperative Learning - Evolutionary Computation - Information Retrieval and Learning - Hybrid Learning Algorithms - Planning and Learning - Convex Optimization - Stochastic Methods - Combinatorial Optimization TRACK 2: Applications - Natural Language Processing - Information Retrieval - Ranking - Web Applications - Economics, Business and Forecasting Applications - Bioinformatics and Systems Biology - Audio and Speech Processing - Signal Processing - Image Understanding - Sensors and Early Vision - Motion and Tracking - Image-based Modelling - Shape Representation - Object Recognition - Video Analysis - Medical Imaging - Learning and Adaptive Control - Perception - Learning in Process Automation - Learning of Action Patterns - Virtual Environments - Robotics KEYNOTES SPEAKERS: Ludmila Kuncheva, Bangor University, U.K. Tiberio Caetano, NICTA, Australia Francis Bach, INRIA, France (list not yet complete) PAPER SUBMISSION Authors should submit an original paper in English, carefully checked for correct grammar and spelling, using the on-line submission procedure. The initial submission must have between 3 to 13 pages otherwise it will be rejected without review. Each paper should clearly indicate the nature of its technical/scientific contribution, and the problems, domains or environments to which it is applicable. A "double-blind" paper evaluation method will be used. To facilitate that, the authors are kindly requested to produce and provide the paper, WITHOUT any reference to any of the authors. This means that is necessary to remove the authors personal details, the acknowledgements section and any reference that may disclose the authors identity. Submission types: A) Regular Paper Submission A regular paper presents a work where the research is completed or almost finished. It does not necessary means that the acceptance is as a full paper. It may be accepted as a "full paper" (30 min. oral presentation), a "short paper" (20 min. oral presentation) or a "poster". B) Position Paper Submission A position paper presents an arguable opinion about an issue. The goal of a position paper is to convince the audience that your opinion is valid and worth listening to, without the need to present completed research work and/or validated results. It is, nevertheless, important to support your argument with evidence to ensure the validity of your claims. A position paper may be a short report and discussion of ideas, facts, situations, methods, procedures or results of scientific research (bibliographic, experimental, theoretical, or other) focused on one of the conference topic areas. The acceptance of a position paper is restricted to the categories of "short paper" or "poster", i.e. a position paper is not a candidate to acceptance as "full paper". PUBLICATIONS All accepted papers (full, short and posters) will be published in the conference proceedings, under an ISBN reference, on paper and on CD-ROM support. All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SciTePress Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/). A short list of presented papers will be selected so that revised and extended versions of these papers will be published by Springer-Verlag in a AISC Series book. Top selected papers in specific areas of interest will be published as a special issue in the Neurocomputing Journal. The proceedings of ICPRAM will be submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index, INSPEC, DBLP and EI. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Please check the program committee members at http://icpram.org/call_for_papers.asp#program_committee From rmoreno at bcs.rochester.edu Thu Mar 10 10:16:39 2011 From: rmoreno at bcs.rochester.edu (Ruben Moreno Bote) Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:16:39 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Position in Computational Neuroscience / Moreno-Bote lab Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20110310101422.01154408@bcs.rochester.edu> Position in Theoretical Neuroscience. Rub?n Moreno-Bote?s lab. Foundation Sant Joan de D?u, Barcelona, Spain. A position (PhD or Postdoc) is available in the group of Theoretical Neuroscience of Rub?n Moreno-Bote in the Foundation Sant Joan de D?u, Barcelona, Spain. We are looking for candidates with Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science or similar backgrounds, ideally with knowledge of Neuroscience or Computational Neuroscience, and interested in theory and applications. We will also consider candidates with Psychology background interested in mathematical modeling. The candidate will develop state of the art mathematical techniques to understand neuronal dynamics and will have access to multielectrode recording neural data. He/she could be also involved in human behavior experiments and the development of models of visual perception. The candidate will benefit from the stimulating environment of Barcelona area in Theoretical and Systems Neuroscience and the opportunity of enjoying a lively city. Our lab forms part of a larger network of neuroscience lab in Barcelona (http://www.barcelonaneuroscience.com). The Foundation Sant Joan de D?u is a rapidly growing private research institution associated with the hospitals Sant Joan de D?u in Spain and the University of Barcelona. In the past recent years it has incorporated several new researchers in the area of Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology, and the newly created Theoretical Neuroscience group will start activities on September 2011. Financial support is provided by the Foundation Sant Joan de D?u (http://www.fsjd.org), a Marie Curie IRG grant, and a Ram?n y Cajal Award. APPLICATION : A brief letter of motivation (only for postdoc applicants), a full CV in pdf format, and names and addresses of 2 referees should be sent to the following address: rmoreno at bcs.rochester.edu Informal inquires are welcome. From jainv at janelia.hhmi.org Fri Mar 11 10:04:08 2011 From: jainv at janelia.hhmi.org (Jain, Viren) Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:04:08 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Connectomics Postdoctoral Positions Available Message-ID: <2DA21984-B8A8-45A2-A5B1-01BA2526E201@janelia.hhmi.org> The Jain Lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Farm Research Campus is looking for highly motivated individuals to pursue interdisciplinary computer science & neuroscience research projects. Opportunities available for individuals with interest and backgrounds in: >> Machine Learning Structured Prediction, Supervised/Active Learning, Feature Learning >> Computer Vision Segmentation, Shape Description, Object Recognition >> Human Computation Human-Computer Interaction, Crowdsourcing CONTACT: jainv at janelia.hhmi.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110311/de12b412/attachment-0001.html From r.gross at sheffield.ac.uk Fri Mar 11 12:12:25 2011 From: r.gross at sheffield.ac.uk (Roderich Gross) Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:12:25 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: =?windows-1252?q?=5BDeadline_Extension=5D_Final_C?= =?windows-1252?q?FP_=96_TAROS_2011_-_12th_Conference_Towards_Autonomous_R?= =?windows-1252?q?obotic_Systems_=28LNCS=2C_Springer=29?= Message-ID: <19927462-C5ED-484B-9316-836926662708@sheffield.ac.uk> Final Call for Papers Due to numerous requests, the submission deadline has been extended to March 25, 2011. TAROS 2011 12th Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems 31 August - 2 September 2011. Sheffield, United Kingdom More details and up-to-date information at http://www.taros.org.uk/ ABOUT TAROS Now in its 12th edition, TAROS is the UK's premiere annual conference for autonomous robotics. The meeting encompasses topics across the entire range of robotics research and is open to worldwide contributors and participants. TAROS 2011 will be a single-track conference, which includes a limited number of invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of high quality, original research. Submissions by authors who are new to TAROS are encouraged. An extra day (Friday 2nd September) has been added to this year's meeting to host a symposium on links between the academic and industrial robotics communities. PLENARY SPEAKERS Joseph Ayers (Northeastern University) Simon Blackmore (UniBots Ltd) Yiannis Demiris (Imperial College London) Paul Newman (The Oxford Mobile Robotics Group) PUBLICATION DETAILS Accepted full papers and extended abstracts will be published by Springer in the LNAI/LNCS series (http://www.springer.com/lncs) and authors will be required to follow the Springer publishing guidelines. The series is listed in various indexing services (e.g., ISI Proceedings, Scopus, ACM, and EI). The journal Robotics and Autonomous Systems will publish a special issue dedicated to TAROS 2011. ULRICH NEHMZOW BEST PAPER AWARD (In Memoriam of Professor Ulrich Nehmzow, founder of TAROS) A best paper award will be presented at the conference. The selection is based on the originality and quality of the submission and its potential impact. SUBMITTING TO TAROS 2011 TAROS 2011 invites both full papers (up to 12 pages, LNCS format) and extended abstracts (2 pages, LNCS format). Full papers are invited from researchers at any stage in their career but should present significant findings and advances in robotics research; more preliminary work would be better suited to extended abstract submission. All contributions will be fully refereed by at least three members of the programme committee. Full papers will be accepted for either oral presentation or poster presentation. Extended abstracts will be accepted for poster presentation only. Papers are solicited in all areas of robotics, including, but not restricted to: - Advanced applications of autonomous robots (industrial and research) - Advanced materials - Advanced medical robotics, robots for surgery - Analysis of robot-environment interaction - Applications development - Assistive robotics - Autonomous assembly robotics - Autonomous vehicles - Biohybrid robotic systems - Biomimetic and bio-inspired robotics - Cognitive robotics - Cooperative robotics - Developmental robotics - Ethical and societal issues in robotics - Evolutionary robotics - Field robotics - Flying robots (unmanned- and micro- air vehicles) - Hardware issues, devices and techniques, advanced sensor and actuator hardware - Human-Robot interaction and interfaces - Humanoid robotics - Intelligent prostheses - Learning and adaptation - Legged robots - Long-term interaction and operation - Modelling and analysis of robot models - Modular reconfigurable robots - Navigation, localisation, map building and path planning - Personal robotics - Robot autonomy including energy self-sufficiency - Robot communication and language - Robot control architectures - Robots in education, the arts and entertainment - Robot vision, sensing and perception - Service robotics - Space and planetary robotics - Swarm robotics The submission system and detailed instructions are available on http://www.taros.org.uk/. ABOUT SHEFFIELD The City of Sheffield is built on seven hills and near the confluence of five rivers, it borders on to the UK's first national park (the Peak District). The city is known for its industrial heritage, current hi-tech industries, and as a cultural hub for South Yorkshire. The City hosts two Universities - Sheffield Hallam University (http://www.shu.ac.uk/) who will host TAROS 2011 and the University of Sheffield (http://www.shef.ac.uk/) who will co-organise the event. The two Universities house many active robotic research groups who are working together to organise the meeting. DEADLINES March 25, 2011, 23:59 PCT Submission deadline May 11, 2011 Notification of acceptance May 27, 2011 Camera ready copy August 31 - September 2, 2011 Conference INDUSTRIAL PARTICIPATION The participation of representatives of the industry is welcome both in the main conference and particularly in the academic-industry 1-day symposium. Exhibition space is available. Please contact info at taros.org.uk. TAROS 2011 SPONSORS IEEE Robotics and Automation Society - UKRI Chapter (co-sponsor) Looking forwards to seeing you in Sheffield. Jacques Penders & Tony Prescott Conference chairs, TAROS 2011 http://www.taros.org.uk info at taros.org.uk From wsenn at cns.unibe.ch Fri Mar 11 07:25:25 2011 From: wsenn at cns.unibe.ch (Walter Senn) Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:25:25 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Biological Cybernetics: vol 104, number 1-2 --- Table of Content Message-ID: <4D7A14B5.8050404@cns.unibe.ch> Biological Cybernetics: vol 104, number 1-2 --- Table of Content Prospect: "What is the biological basis of sensorimotor integration?" http://www.springerlink.com/content/qq45j20k5h208634/ by Martha Flanders Original papers: "A simple model can unify a broad range of phenomena in retinotectal map development" http://www.springerlink.com/content/97378v08138224h3/ "Intermittent control: a computational theory of human control" Peter Gawthrop, Ian Loram, Martin Lakie & Henrik Gollee http://www.springerlink.com/content/j20743g114060rp5/ "Fast estimation of motion from selected populations of retinal ganglion cells" Alexander Cerquera & Jan Freund http://www.springerlink.com/content/7gg84ul7470l3534/ "Modeling trade-off between time-optimal and minimum energy in saccade main sequence" Xuezhong Wang & Simon M. Hsiang http://www.springerlink.com/content/03p435060m427136/ "Analytical and numerical analysis of inverse optimization problems: conditions of uniqueness and computational methods" Alexander V. Terekhov & Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky http://www.springerlink.com/content/v61343q21237u775/ "Deriving neural network controllers from neuro-biological data: implementation of a single-leg stick insect controller" Arndt von Twickel, Ansgar B?schges & Frank Pasemann http://www.springerlink.com/content/r48480417507682w/ "Modelling the isometric force response to multiple pulse stimuli in locust skeletal muscle" Emma Wilson, Emiliano Rustighi, Brian R. Mace & Philip L. Newland http://www.springerlink.com/content/93581181g4484005/ "Action understanding and active inference" Karl Friston, J?r?mie Mattout & James Kilner http://www.springerlink.com/content/t31201xm22248035/ ---- Biological Cybernetics, all issues: http://www.springerlink.com/content/100465/ From chiestand at salk.edu Tue Mar 15 19:08:58 2011 From: chiestand at salk.edu (Chris Hiestand) Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:08:58 -0700 Subject: Connectionists: NIPS 2011 Call for Papers Message-ID: Submissions are solicited for the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in all aspects of neural and statistical information processing and computation, and their applications. The conference is a highly selective, single track meeting that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. Submissions by authors who are new to NIPS are encouraged. In a switch from its previous Vancouver venue, the 2011 conference will be held on December 13-15 in Granada, Spain. One day of tutorials (December 12) will precede the main conference, and two days of workshops (December 16-17) will follow it at the Sierra Nevada ski resort. Deadline for Paper Submissions: Thursday June 2, 2011, 23:59 Universal Time (4:59pm Pacific Daylight Time). Submit at: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/NIPS2011/ Technical Areas: Papers are solicited in all areas of neural information processing and statistical learning, including, but not limited to: *Algorithms and Architectures: statistical learning algorithms, kernel methods, graphical models, Gaussian processes, neural networks, dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, model selection, combinatorial optimization, relational and structured learning. *Applications: innovative applications that use machine learning, including systems for time series prediction, bioinformatics, systems biology, text/web analysis, multimedia processing, and robotics. *Brain Imaging: neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, EEG (electroencephalogram), ERP (event related potentials), MEG (magnetoencephalogram), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), brain mapping, brain segmentation, brain computer interfaces. *Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: theoretical, computational, or experimental studies of perception, psychophysics, human or animal learning, memory, reasoning, problem solving, natural language processing, and neuropsychology. *Control and Reinforcement Learning: decision and control, exploration, planning, navigation, Markov decision processes, game playing, multi-agent coordination, computational models of classical and operant conditioning. *Hardware Technologies: analog and digital VLSI, neuromorphic engineering, computational sensors and actuators, microrobotics, bioMEMS, neural prostheses, photonics, molecular and quantum computing. *Learning Theory: generalization, regularization and model selection, Bayesian learning, spaces of functions and kernels, statistical physics of learning, online learning and competitive analysis, hardness of learning and approximations, statistical theory, large deviations and asymptotic analysis, information theory. *Neuroscience: theoretical and experimental studies of processing and transmission of information in biological neurons and networks, including spike train generation, synaptic modulation, plasticity and adaptation. *Speech and Signal Processing: recognition, coding, synthesis, denoising, segmentation, source separation, auditory perception, psychoacoustics, dynamical systems, recurrent networks, language models, dynamic and temporal models. *Visual Processing: biological and machine vision, image processing and coding, segmentation, object detection and recognition, motion detection and tracking, visual psychophysics, visual scene analysis and interpretation. Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of technical quality, novelty, potential impact, and clarity. Submission Instructions: All submissions will be made electronically, in PDF format. As in previous years, reviewing will be double-blind -- the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. Papers are limited to eight pages, including figures and tables, in the NIPS style. An additional ninth page containing only cited references is allowed. Complete submission and formatting instructions, including style files, are available from the NIPS website, http://nips.cc. Supplementary Material: Authors can submit up to 10 MB of material, containing proofs, audio, images, video, or even data or source code. Note that the reviewers and the program committee reserve the right to judge the paper solely on the basis of the 9 pages of the paper; looking at any extra material is up to the discretion of the reviewers and is not required. Electronic submissions will be accepted until Thursday June 2, 2011, 23:59 Universal Time (4:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time). As was the case last year, final papers will be due in advance of the conference. Dual Submissions Policy: Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or during the NIPS review period are in submission to another peer-reviewed and published venue are not appropriate for NIPS, with three exceptions listed below. These exceptions, which have been approved by the NIPS Foundation board in the interests of speeding up scientific communication and improving the efficiency of peer review, are as follows: 1. Concurrent submission to other venues is acceptable provided that: (a) The concurrent submission or intention to submit to other venues is declared to all venues, (b) NIPS and the concurrent venues are given permission by the author(s) to coordinate reviewing, and (c) acceptance to one venue imposes withdrawal from all other venues with the exception stated in 2 below. 2. NIPS submissions that summarize a longer journal paper, whether published, accepted, or in submission, are acceptable if the authors inform NIPS and the journal and give them permission to coordinate reviewing. 3. It is acceptable to submit to NIPS 2011 work that has been made available as a technical report (or similar, e.g. in arXiv) as long as the conditions above are satisfied. None of the above should be construed as overriding the requirements of other publishing venues. In addition, keep in mind that author anonymity to NIPS reviewers might be compromised for authors availing themselves of exceptions 2 and 3. Authors? Responsibilities: If there are papers that may appear to violate any of these conditions, it is the authors' responsibility to (1) cite these papers (preserving anonymity), (2) argue in the body of your paper why your NIPS paper is non-trivially different from these concurrent submissions, and (3) include anonymized versions of those papers in the supplemental material. Demonstrations and Workshops: There is a separate Demonstration track at NIPS. Authors wishing to submit to the Demonstration track should consult the Call for Demonstrations. The workshops will be held at the Sierra Nevada ski resort December 16-17. The upcoming call for workshop proposals will provide details. Web URL: http://nips.cc/Conferences/2011/CallForPapers From laurent.perrinet at incm.cnrs-mrs.fr Fri Mar 18 12:15:06 2011 From: laurent.perrinet at incm.cnrs-mrs.fr (Laurent Perrinet) Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:15:06 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Lateral spread of orientation selectivity in V1 is controlled by intracortical cooperativity Message-ID: <96C3B558-87FB-449C-9139-F22021504EE3@incm.cnrs-mrs.fr> Dear list, This paper by Dr Fr?d?ric Chavane and colleagues was recently published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It is a rather complete characterization of the functional propagation of orientation selectivity in area V1 using VSD imaging and intracellular recordings in cats. One rather surprising result is that "Beyond a distance of one hypercolumn, the lateral spread of cortical activity gradually lost its orientation preference (...). In contrast, when the stimulus size was increased, we observed orientation-selective spread of activation beyond the feedforward imprint." http://www.frontiersin.org/systems_neuroscience/10.3389/fnsys.2011.00004/full (open access to the full text) Disclaimer: I am not author nor associated directly with this research, but thought that this list may be interested. cheers, Laurent Perrinet -- Laurent Perrinet - INCM (UMR6193)/CNRS http://www.incm.cnrs-mrs.fr/LaurentPerrinet -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110318/97f49bd5/attachment.html From terry at salk.edu Fri Mar 18 00:28:45 2011 From: terry at salk.edu (Terry Sejnowski) Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:28:45 -0700 Subject: Connectionists: NEURAL COMPUTATION - April, 2011 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Neural Computation - Contents - Volume 23, Number 4 - April 1, 2011 ARTICLE Integration of Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Decision-Making Theories of the Basal Ganglia Rafal Bogacz and Tobias Larsen LETTERS Quantifying Neurotransmission Reliability Through Metrics-Based Information Analysis Romain Brasselet, Roland S. Johansson, and Angelo Arleo Enhanced Stimulus Encoding Capabilities with Spectral Selectivity in Inhibitory Circuits by STDP Antoine Coulon, Guillaume Beslon, and Hedi A. Soula An Infomax Algorithm Can Perform Both Familiarity Discrimination and Feature Extraction in a Single Network Andrew Lulham, Rafal Bogacz, Simon Vogt, and Malcolm W. Brown Synaptic Scaling Stabilizes Persistent Activity Driven by Asynchronous Neurotransmitter Release Vladislav Volman and Richard C. Gerkin Neuronal Responses Below Firing Threshold for Subthreshold Cross-Modal Enhancement Osamu Hoshino Molecular Diffusion Model of Neurotransmitter Homeostasis Around Synapses Supporting Gradients Ashwin Mohan, Sandeep Pendyam, Peter W. Kalivas, and Satish S. Nair Effects of Multiplicative Power Law Neural Noise in Visual Information Processing Jose Medina Expectation Propagation with Factorizing Distributions: A Gaussian Approximation and Performance Results for Simple Models Fabiano Ribeiro and Manfred Opper ----- ON-LINE - http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/neco SUBSCRIPTIONS - 2011 - VOLUME 23 - 12 ISSUES USA Others Electronic only Student/Retired $67 $130 $62 Individual $118 $181 $110 Institution $986 $1,049 $882 Canada: Add 5% GST MIT Press Journals, 238 Main Street, Suite 500, Cambridge, MA 02142-9902. Tel: (617) 253-2889 FAX: (617) 577-1545 journals-orders at mit.edu http://mitpressjournals.org/neuralcomp ----- From mcclelland at stanford.edu Fri Mar 18 21:57:05 2011 From: mcclelland at stanford.edu (Jay McClelland) Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:57:05 -0700 Subject: Connectionists: David Rumelhart Message-ID: <4D840D71.5010706@stanford.edu> Dear Connectionists, It is with great personal sadness that I convey the news that David Rumelhart has passed away. Rumelhart developed powerful algorithms for training neural networks and played a critical leadership role in articulating the computational advantages and implications of neural networks in the 1980's. I benefited greatly from his leadership and his insight. So did many others, and so did the field of neural computation. The obituary below appeared today in the Stanford Report. -- Jay McClelland =================================================== Stanford Report, March 17, 2011 David Rumelhart, pioneer in cognitive neuroscience, dies at 68 The Stanford psychologist created computer models that simulated human perception, language understanding and memory. BY ADAM GORLICK David Rumelhart, a psychology professor who studied how people think and learn complex skills such as reading and the use of language, has died. He was 68. Rumelhart, who died on March 13 in Michigan after suffering from a progressive debilitating neurological condition, was a pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience who explored the concept of connectionism ? the idea that no single neuron in the human brain does its job alone in processing information. Leading a team of researchers that included James McClelland ? now chair of the Psychology Department ? Rumelhart created computer models in the 1970s and 1980s that simulated human perception, language understanding, memory and a wide range of other cognitive tasks. "Dave was interested in how we're able to bring thoughts together in our minds," McClelland said. "He wanted to know how we can achieve an insight or grasp what the right answer is to a subtle question." Together, Rumelhart and McClelland wrote /Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition/, a book that brought the concept of connectionism to a wider audience of psychologists, neuroscientists and computer scientists. Born in Wessington Springs, S.D., Rumelhart did his undergraduate work in psychology and mathematics at the University of South Dakota. He earned his doctorate at Stanford in 1967 and immediately launched his teaching career at the University of California-San Diego. While at UCSD, Rumelhart began honing his ideas on how the brain works. He became dissatisfied with a classic understanding of the human thought process that was based on the notion that cognition happens through the mind's manipulation of symbols. "He became fascinated by the idea that our minds work at a sub-symbolic level," McClelland said. "The idea was that thoughts emerge from neural activity. They're the consequence of the interaction of neurons. He went behind the scenes to look for the actual basis for our thinking ability." Rumelhart came to Stanford in 1987, where he continued developing the framework he and McClelland established in /Parallel Distributed Processing. /A shy professor unless one knew him well, Rumelhart often showed his competitive streak on the tennis court or makeshift volleyball court he would fill with students and fellow professors on the Oval. Among his honors and awards, Rumelhart was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He and McClelland jointly received several awards as well, including the Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1993. Struck with a neurological disease a few years after arriving at Stanford, Rumelhart stopped teaching in 1998. In 2000, the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation established the Rumelhart Prize, a $100,000 award given annually to scientists who make a significant contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition. Rumelhart is survived by his former wife, Marilyn Austin; their sons, Peter and Karl Rumelhart; his brothers, Donald and Roger Rumelhart; and four grandsons. A memorial service will be scheduled this spring. -- James L. (Jay) McClelland Lucie Stern Professor& Chair Dept. of Psychology, Stanford University 650-725-1232 | www.psych.stanford.edu/~jlm From jmodayil at cs.ualberta.ca Sun Mar 20 20:19:47 2011 From: jmodayil at cs.ualberta.ca (Joseph Modayil) Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:19:47 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: AAAI-11 Workshop on Lifelong Learning from Sensorimotor Experience In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: ============================================== ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CALL FOR PAPERS ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The AAAI-11 Workshop on ? ? ? ? ? ?Lifelong Learning from Sensorimotor Experience ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?San Francisco, California ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?August 7, 2011 ?http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~jmodayil/lifelonglearning/ ============================================= Important Dates * April 22, 2011: Submission Deadline * May 13, 2011: Notifications of Acceptance * May 27, 2011: Deadline for final manuscripts * August 7, 2011: Workshop A truly intelligent agent should be capable of learning online from a lifetime of raw sensorimotor experience, by autonomously developing internal structures that provide the foundations for learning and further development. This problem sits at the core of artificial intelligence, but it has traditionally been difficult for algorithms to learn online from a single high-dimensional time series of correlated data. However, recent progress in several branches of AI suggests that the goal is getting closer. This workshop will bring together researchers to share ideas and insights from several subfields including reinforcement learning, robotics, and deep learning. The workshop will cover methodology for life-long learning and discuss experimental platforms that can be used towards this goal. Topics The topics of interest include the following, but are not limited to them. ? ?* Curiosity-driven exploration ? ?* Representational development ? ?* Deep learning ? ?* Learning skill hierarchies ? ?* Off-policy learning ? ?* Developmental robotics ? ?* Cognitive robotics ? ?* Transfer learning Format This one-day workshop will consist of invited speakers, oral presentations, poster presentations, and group discussion. To encourage discussion, the workshop will be limited to 50 participants. Submissions We invite both full submissions (6 pages) on new or ongoing work, and extended abstracts (up to 2 pages) on previously published work. Accepted submissions will be selected for oral or poster presentation. Full papers should be formatted with standard AAAI style files. Please e-mail submissions to lifelonglearning2011 at gmail.com with the title, author, and abstract in the body and the paper attached as a PDF. Organizing Committee Joseph Modayil (University of Alberta), Doina Precup (McGill University), Satinder Singh (University of Michigan) Program Committee Patrick Beeson (TRACLabs), Thomas Degris (University of Alberta), Carlos Diuk (Princeton University), Ian Fasel (University of Arizona), Honglak Lee (University of Michigan), Lihong Li (Yahoo Research), Manuel Lopes (INRIA), Erik Talvittie (Franklin and Marshall College), Matthew Taylor (Lafayette College), David Wingate (MIT) From emmanuel.vincent at inria.fr Mon Mar 21 09:24:09 2011 From: emmanuel.vincent at inria.fr (Emmanuel Vincent) Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:24:09 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Last call: PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge In-Reply-To: <1137017353.56773.1286720735219.JavaMail.root@zmbs3.inria.fr> References: <1137017353.56773.1286720735219.JavaMail.root@zmbs3.inria.fr> Message-ID: <4D875179.90105@inria.fr> ---------------------------------------------- PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge Deadline: April 14, 2011 Workshop: September 1, 2011, Florence, Italy http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/challenge.html ---------------------------------------------- News: * Test data: The final test data has now been released and can be downloaded from, http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/PCC/datasets.html The test set has exactly the same format as the development test set, but uses a different selection of 600 Grid utterances mixed with the CHiME background at a different set of temporal locations within the corpus. The SNRs range from -6 to +9 dB. The utterances are virtually positioned at the same spatial location, i.e. directly in front of the binaural manikin at a distance of 2 metres, but a different instance of the room impulse response has been used. As before, the data is available at either 16 or 48 kHz, and as either pre-segmented utterances or continuous audio. An annotation file has been provided so that utterances can be located within the continuous audio. Feel free to use the continuous audio and the annotation to determine the acoustic context, e.g. for systems that are employing background noise modelling etc. The existing HTK-based evaluation tools can be applied to the test data without modification -- just use the command line argument to point the script at the right directory. The tools and documentation are available here, http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/PCC/evaluation.html * Special Issue: The Elsevier Journal Computer Speech and Language has agreed to publish a Special Issue on the theme of Speech Separation and Recognition in Multisource Environments. CHiME challenge participants will be invited to submit extended versions of their workshop papers. * CHiME Workshop: The workshop will take place at the Interspeech venue on the day after the main conference has finished, 1st September. The workshop will feature a session on the PASCAL CHiME speech separation challenge but will also be accepting papers on the general theme of source separation and recognition. A call for papers has been issued at http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/chime/workshop/. If you require any support with the challenge or have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us (chime at dcs.shef.ac.uk). It would also be helpful to us at this stage if you could confirm your interest in participating. Best regards, Jon Barker (University of Sheffield, UK) Emmanuel Vincent (INRIA Rennes, France) Ning Ma (University of Sheffield, UK) Heidi Christensen (University of Sheffield, UK) Phil Green, (University of Sheffield, UK) From pierre-yves.oudeyer at inria.fr Mon Mar 21 10:08:08 2011 From: pierre-yves.oudeyer at inria.fr (Pierre-Yves Oudeyer) Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:08:08 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: [CfP, extended deadline] ICDL-EpiRob 2011, 11th April Message-ID: Call for Papers ? Call for Tutorials and Special Sessions IEEE CONFERENCE ON DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING, AND EPIGENETIC ROBOTICS IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2011 Frankfurt am Main, Germany August 24?27, 2011 www.icdl-epirob.org Conference description The past decade has seen the emergence of a new scientific field that studies how intelligent biological and artificial systems develop sensorimotor, cognitive and social abilities, over extended periods of time, through dynamic interactions of their brain and body with their physical and social environments. This field lies at the intersection of a number of scientific and engineering disciplines including Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology, Developmental Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and Philosophy. Various terms have been associated with this new field such as Autonomous Mental Development, Epigenetic Robotics, Developmental Robotics, etc., and several scientific meetings have been established. The two most prominent conferences of this field, the International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) and the International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics (EpiRob), are now joining forces and invite submissions for a joint meeting in 2011, to explore and extend the interdisciplinary boundaries of this field. Keynote speakers Andrew Barto, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Jean Mandler (overview talk), University of California, San Diego Erin Schuman, Max Planck Insitute for Brain Research, Framkfurt am Main Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig Call for papers We invite submissions for this exciting window into the future of developmental sciences. Submissions which establish novel links between brain, behavior and computation are particularly encouraged. Topics of interest include ? but are not limited to: ? The development and emergence of perceptual, motor, cognitive, emotional, social, and communicational skills in biological systems and robots ? General principles of development and learning ? Neural and behavioral plasticity ? Grounding of knowledge and development of representations ? Biologically inspired architectures for cognitive development and open-ended development ? Models of emotionally driven behavior ? Mechanisms of intrinsic motivation, exploration and play ? Embodied cognition: Foundations and applications ? Social development in humans and robots ? Use of robots in applied settings such as autism therapy ? Epistemological approaches to Epigenetic / Developmental Robotics Submissions will be accepted in two categories: Full six-page papers: Accepted manuscripts will be included in the conference proceedings published by IEEE. They will be selected for either an oral presentation or a featured poster presentation at the conference; featured posters will have a 1 minute "teaser" presentation as part of the main conference session. For articles requiring more than six pages, up to two additional pages may be submitted at an extra charge. Two-page poster abstracts: The aim of this format is to encourage dissemination of late-breaking results or work that is not sufficiently mature for a full paper. These submissions will NOT be included in the conference proceedings (but the short abstracts will appear online at Frontiers in Neurorobotics http://www.frontiersin.org/neurorobotics/about). Accepted abstracts will be presented during the evening poster sessions. Manuscripts should be submitted through the online conference management system, available at the conference website www.icdl-epirob.org. For the paper preparation, follow the instructions at the conference website. Call for tutorials We invite experts in different areas to organize a 3-hour tutorial, which will be held on the first day of the conference. Participants in tutorials are asked to register for the main conference as well. Tutorials are meant to provide insights into specific topics as well as overviews that will inform the interdisciplinary audience about the state-of-the-art in child development, neuroscience, robotics, or any of the other disciplines represented at the conference. Submissions (max. two pages) should be sent no later than March 28th to Katharina Rohlfing (kjr at uni-bielefeld.de) and Ian Fasel (ianfasel at cs.arizona.edu) including: - Title of tutorial - Tutorial speaker(s), including short CVs; - Concept of the tutorial; target audience or prerequisites. All proposals submitted will be subjected to a review process. Call for special sessions A special session will be an opportunity to present a topic in depth, for which format a slot of 1.5 hours will be offered. Special session organizers are invited to submit (1) a summary (250 words) describing the topic, purpose and target audience of the session as well as (2) abstracts of papers (each 250 words) that will constitute the group of presentations. It is suggested that a special session includes three oral presentations to allow for sufficient presentation and discussion time. A discussant (from another discipline) may be added to the special session. Tutorial and Special Session proposals should be sent no later than March 28th to Katharina Rohlfing (kjr at uni-bielefeld.de) and Ian Fasel (ianfasel at cs.arizona.edu). All proposals submitted will be subjected to a review process. Abstract and Paper Submission Deadline: April 11, 2011 Notification Due: May 30, 2011 Final Version Due: June 20, 2011 Conference: August, 24?27, 2011 Child-care For families, child-care services will be provided. Please contact Katharina Rohlfing (kjr at uni-bielefeld.de) concerning your interest in child-care services by June 14. The detailed organization will be planned according to the needs. Organizing Committee General Chairs: Angelo Cangelosi (Plymouth, UK) and Jochen Triesch (FIAS, Frankfurt, Germany) Program Chairs: Ian Fasel (University of Arizona, USA) and Katharina Rohlfing (Bielefeld University, Germany) Publications Chair: Francesco Nori (IIT Genova, Italy) Publicity Chairs: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (INRIA Bordeaux, France), Matthew Schlesinger (Southern Illinois University, USA), Yukie Nagai (Osaka University, Japan) Treasurer: Gisbert Jockenhoeffer (FIAS Frankfurt, Germany) Program Committee Minoru Asada, Osaka University, Japan Christian Balkenius, Lund University, Sweden Tony Belpaeme, University of Plymouth, UK Luc Berthouze, University of Sussex, UK Angelo Cangelosi, University of Plymouth, UK Eliana Colunga, University of Colorado, USA Rick Dale, University of Memphis, USA Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Hertfordshire, UK Gedeon Deak, University of California San Diego, USA Kerstin Fischer, University of Southern Denmark Anna Fisher, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Christian Goerick, Honda Research Institute, Germany Lakshmi Gogate, Florida Gulf Coast University, USA Roderic Grupen, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA Stephen Hart, Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa Birger Johansson, Lund University, Sweden Susan Jones, Indiana University, USA Stefan Kopp, Bielefeld University, Germany Benjamin Kuipers, University of Michigan, USA Karl F. MacDorman, Indiana University, USA Giorgio Metta, University of Genoa and IIT, Italy Takashi Minato, Osaka University, Japan Joseph Modayil, University of Alberta, Canada Clayton Morrison, University of Arizona, USA Yukie Nagai Osaka, University, Japan Lorenzo Natale, Italian Institute of Technology, Italy Tim Oates, University of Maryland Baltimore County Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, INRIA, France Katharina Rohlfing, Bielefeld University, Germany Erol Sahin, Middle East Technical University, Turkey Brian Scassellati, Yale University, USA Mattew Schlesinger, Southern Illinois University, USA J?rgen Schmidhuber, University of Lugano, Switzerland Alessandra Sciutti, IIT, Italy Jeff Siskind, Purdue University, USA Nathan Sprague, Kalamazoo College, USA Jun Tani, RIKEN, Japan Juyang Weng, Michigan State University, USA Heiko Wersing, Honda Research Institute, Germany Britta Wrede, Bielefeld University, Germany Chen Yu, Indiana University, USA Hui Zhang, Indiana University, USA Zhengyou Zhang, Microsoft Research, USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110321/9dc0ad6a/attachment-0001.html From h.jaeger at jacobs-university.de Mon Mar 21 10:24:58 2011 From: h.jaeger at jacobs-university.de (Herbert Jaeger) Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:24:58 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: PhD or Postdoc research position in the area of machine learning/ neural networks / robot control (Herbert Jaeger) Message-ID: <4D875FBA.6000109@jacobs-university.de> An immediately fillable, fully funded PHD OR POSTDOC RESEARCH POSITION IN MACHINE LEARNING / NEURAL NETWORKS / ROBOT CONTROL is open in the research group (http://minds.jacobs-university.de) of Herbert Jaeger at Jacobs University Bremen. The position is created within the integrated project Adaptive Modular Architecture for Rich Motor Skills (AMARSi, http://www.amarsi-project.eu/), funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Program Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics. The consortium comprises ten European research groups from robotics, machine learning, computational neuroscience and behavioral neuroscience, providing a rich context for interdisciplinary research. The AMARSi project investigates complex modular neurocontroller architectures for quadruped and humanoid robots, and strives to unite methods from robot engineering with insights from biological motor control. In the MINDS group, the emphasis is on the design and mathematical analysis of hierarchical motor control learning architectures based on recurrent neural networks in the spirit of reservoir computing (www.reservoir-computing.org). The following set of qualifications will be used for assessing applications: * a PhD or Master degree or equivalent diploma in machine learning, control engineering, computational neuroscience, mathematics, theoretical physics, signal processing, or similar fields (mandatory); * a strong mathematical background (mandatory), especially in dynamical systems (highly desired), and signals and systems (desired), * experience in machine learning, control, recurrent neural networks (highly desired), * experience in intelligent agents design (desired), * a very good command of English (mandatory), * openness to interdisciplinary work and endless curiosity (mandatory). Jacobs University Bremen is an equal opportunity employer and has been certified ?Family Friendly? by the Hertie-Stiftung. Please send in electronic format a letter of application, CV, copies of academic certificates, and possibly samples of published work to Herbert Jaeger (h.jaeger at jacobs-university.de), who also invites further inquiries. Applicants passing an initial screening will be requested to supply two letters of reference. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr. Herbert Jaeger Professor for Computational Science Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH Campus Ring 28759 Bremen, Germany Phone (+49) 421 200 3215 Fax (+49) 421 200 49 3215 email h.jaeger at jacobs-university.de http://minds.jacobs-university.de ------------------------------------------------------------------ From ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk Mon Mar 21 17:54:55 2011 From: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk (Dr Amir Hussain) Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:54:55 -0000 Subject: Connectionists: Springer's Cognitive Computation journal: Table of Contents, Vol.3, No.1 / March 2011 issue Message-ID: <01fe01cbe812$9de95100$0301a8c0@drlaptop> Dear Colleagues: (with advance apologies for any cross-postings!) We are delighted to announce the publication of Volume 3, No. 1 / March 2011, (Special Issue on: Saliency, Attention, Active Visual Search and Picture Scanning, edited by John Taylor and Vassilis Cutsuridis) of Springer's Cognitive Computation journal - www.springer.com/12559 The individual list of published articles (Table of Contents) for Vol. 3, No. 1 / March 2011, can be found at the end of this message (followed by an overview of the previous Issues/Archive). A list of the most downloaded articles can be found here: http://www.springer.com/biomed/neuroscience/journal/12559#realtime Other 'Online First' published articles not yet in a print issue can be viewed here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/121361/?Content+Status=Accepted ========================================== Reminder: New Cognitive Computation "LinkedIn" Group: ========================================== To further strengthen the bonds amongst the interdisciplinary audience of Cognitive Computation, we have set-up a "Cognitive Computation LinkedIn group", which has 100+ members already! We warmly invite you to join us at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3155048! For further information on the journal and to sign up for electronic "Table of Contents alerts" please visit the Cognitive Computation homepage: http://www.springer.com/12559 or follow us on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/CognComput for the latest On-line First Issues. For any questions with regards to LinkedIn and/or Twitter, please contact Springer's Publishing Editor: Dr. Martijn Roelandse: martijn.roelandse at springer.com Finally, we would like to invite you to submit short or regular papers describing original research or timely review of important areas - our aim is to peer review all papers within approximately four weeks of receipt. We also welcome relevant high quality proposals for Special Issues (four are already planned for 2011-12!). With our very best wishes to all aspiring readers and authors of Cognitive Computation, Amir Hussain, PhD (Editor-in-Chief: Cognitive Computation) E-mail: ahu at cs.stir.ac.uk Igor Aleksander, PhD (Honorary Editor-in-Chief: Cognitive Computation) John Taylor, PhD (Chair, Advisory Board: Cognitive Computation) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents: Springer's Cognitive Computation, Vol.3, No.1 / Mar 2011 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Special Issue: Saliency, Attention, Active Visual Search and Picture Scanning Guest Editors: John G. Taylor and Vassilis Cutsuridis Special Issue Editorial: Saliency, Attention, Active Visual Search, and Picture Scanning John G. Taylor and Vassilis Cutsuridis http://www.springerlink.com/content/hu2245056415633l/ Editorial Notes John G. Taylor and Vassilis Cutsuridis http://www.springerlink.com/content/k577872972p8823k/ Clustering of Gaze During Dynamic Scene Viewing is Predicted by Motion Parag K. Mital, Tim J. Smith, Robin L. Hill and John M. Henderson http://www.springerlink.com/content/u56646v1542m823t/ Salience in Paintings: Bottom-Up Influences on Eye Fixations Isabella Fuchs, Ulrich Ansorge, Christoph Redies and Helmut Leder http://www.springerlink.com/content/76040225h9271630/ Medium Spatial Frequencies, a Strong Predictor of Salience Fabrice Urban, Brice Follet, Christel Chamaret, Olivier Le Meur and Thierry Baccino http://www.springerlink.com/content/n77132060017122u/ If Visual Saliency Predicts Search, Then Why? Evidence from Normal and Gaze-Contingent Search Tasks in Natural Scenes Tom Foulsham and Geoffrey Underwood http://www.springerlink.com/content/e96h50k3w325450m/ See What I'm Saying? Expertise and Verbalisation in Perception and Imagery of Complex Scenes Katherine Humphrey and Geoffrey Underwood http://www.springerlink.com/content/t140826321258m28/ Eye Movements Show Optimal Average Anticipation with Natural Dynamic Scenes Eleonora Vig, Michael Dorr, Thomas Martinetz and Erhardt Barth http://www.springerlink.com/content/73l4j324g63150n1/ Insights into the Function and Mechanism of Saccadic Decision Making >From Targets Scaled By an Estimate of the Cortical Magnification Factor David J. Yates and Tom Stafford http://www.springerlink.com/content/hwp1w87774540130/ An Image Statistics-Based Model for Fixation Prediction Victoria Yanulevskaya, Jan Bernard Marsman, Frans Cornelissen and Jan-Mark Geusebroek http://www.springerlink.com/content/1480532pj7358847/ Gathering and Retaining Visual Information Over Recurring Fixations: A Model Michal Jacob and Shaul Hochstein http://www.springerlink.com/content/g3866x45v7650t80/ Dynamic, Task-Related and Demand-Driven Scene Representation Sven Rebhan and Julian Eggert http://www.springerlink.com/content/y24m7652hn730474/ Biased Competition in Visual Processing Hierarchies: A Learning Approach Using Multiple Cues Alexander R. T. Gepperth, Sven Rebhan, Stephan Hasler and Jannik Fritsch http://www.springerlink.com/content/f232384811627801/ Spatiotemporal Features for Action Recognition and Salient Event Detection Konstantinos Rapantzikos, Yannis Avrithis and Stefanos Kollias http://www.springerlink.com/content/342h32g7p707119q/ Modelling Visual Search with the Selective Attention for Identification Model (VS-SAIM): A Novel Explanation for Visual Search Asymmetries Dietmar Heinke and Andreas Backhaus http://www.springerlink.com/content/ql107k1623117851/ A Novel Framework for the Analysis of Eye Movements during Visual Search for Knowledge Gathering Laura Dempere-Marco, Xiaopeng Hu and Guang-Zhong Yang http://www.springerlink.com/content/62p750g172x7r224/ Predicting Eye Fixations on Complex Visual Stimuli Using Local Symmetry Gert Kootstra, Bart de Boer and Lambert R. B. Schomaker http://www.springerlink.com/content/36777502656ut607/ A Spatiotemporal Saliency Model for Video Surveillance Tong Yubing, Faouzi Alaya Cheikh, Fahad Fazal Elahi Guraya, Hubert Konik and Alain Tr?meau http://www.springerlink.com/content/v032721946477hv7/ Adaptive Gaze Control for Object Detection G. C. H. E. de Croon, E. O. Postma and H. J. van den Herik http://www.springerlink.com/content/dk20171658v64814/ A Dynamic Neural Field Approach to the Covert and Overt Deployment of Spatial Attention Jeremy Fix, Nicolas Rougier and Frederic Alexandre http://www.springerlink.com/content/d177486p4263t3hj/ A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Component of Visual Attention Gerald S. Wasserman, Amanda R. Bolbecker, Jia Li and Corrinne C. M. Lim-Kessler http://www.springerlink.com/content/n242674k6j705264/ Foveal Attention and Inhibition of Return: A Model for the Generation of Perceptual Scan Paths Winfried A. Fellenz http://www.springerlink.com/content/e737546666841g55/ The Role of Attention in the Context of Associative Memory Andreas Wichert http://www.springerlink.com/content/002mg0k475v10l81/ Selective Attention and Consciousness: Investigating Their Relation Through Computational Modelling Kleanthis C. Neokleous, Marios N. Avraamides, Costas K. Neocleous and Christos N. Schizas http://www.springerlink.com/content/p216p01743722140/ ----------------------------------------- Previous Issues/Archive: Overview ----------------------------------------- The full listing of the Inaugural Vol. 1, No. 1 / March 2009, can be viewed here (which included invited authoritative reviews by leading researchers in their areas - including keynote papers from London University's John Taylor, Igor Aleksander and Stanford University's James McClelland, and invited papers from Ron Sun, Pentti Haikonen, Geoff Underwood, Kevin Gurney, Claudius Gross, Anil Seth and Tom Ziemke): http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/1/1/ The full listing of Vol. 1, No. 2 / June 2009, can be viewed here (which included invited reviews and original research contributions from leading researchers, including Giacomo Indiveri, Rodney Douglas, Jurgen Schmidhuber, Thomas Wennekers, Pentti Kanerva and Friedemann Pulvermuller): http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/1/2/ The full listing of Vol.1, No. 3 / Sep 2009, can be viewed here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/1/3/ The full listing of Vol. 1, No. 4 / Dec 2009, can be viewed here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/1/4/ The full listing of Vol.2, No. 1 / March 2010, can be viewed here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/2/1/ The full listing of Vol.2, No. 2 / June 2010, can be viewed here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/2/2/ The full listing of Vol.2, No. 3 / Aug 2010, can be viewed here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/2/3/ The full listing of Vol.2, No. 4 / Dec 2010, can be viewed here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1866-9956/2/4/ -- The Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year 2009/2010 The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110321/9e2e2d35/attachment-0001.html From Yaochu.Jin at surrey.ac.uk Mon Mar 21 19:24:22 2011 From: Yaochu.Jin at surrey.ac.uk (Yaochu.Jin@surrey.ac.uk) Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 23:24:22 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: New MSc in Computational Intelligence and Computational Biology Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, A new MSc program in Computational Intelligence and Computational Biology (subject to validation) is going to be launched at the University of Surrey, UK in 2012. The MSc is run by the Department of Computing in close collaboration with the BioSciences Department. This MSc shares modules with an MSc in Systems Biology in the Biosciences Department. MSc dissertations can be co-supervised by academic staff from both Computing and Biosciences departments. The programme aims to provide trainings in a cross-disciplinary research area of computational intelligence, computational biology, and computational and cognitive neurosciences. These trainings should foster students? interest in and develop fundamental and up-to-date knowledge for performing research in a related interdisciplinary area. This program also aims to provide students with hands-on technical skills that are needed for finding employment opportunities in industry and research institutes involved in research and development in intelligent optimization and control, bioinformatics, brain research, and computational biology. The MSc consists of the following compulsory modules: + Computational and Cognitive Neurosciences + Brain Machine Interface + Introduction to Computational Systems Biology + Bioinformatics and Bioinformatics Programming + Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Development Students with a BSc in Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Physics and other engineering sciences are welcome. Students graduated from Neurosciences, Biosciences other relevant disciplines who have adequate mathematical and computing skills are also encouraged to apply. The MSc lasts for 12 months in full time mode. Further queries regarding the MSc can be sent to the Program Director, Prof. Yaochu Jin. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Professor Yaochu Jin Head of the Nature-Inspired Computing and Engineering (NICE) Group Department of Computing, University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, United Kingdom Room 35 BB02 Phone: +44(0)1483 686037 Fax: +44(0)1483 686051 Email: yaochu.jin at surrey.ac.uk http://www.surrey.ac.uk/computing/people/yaochu_jin/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From d.mareschal at bbk.ac.uk Tue Mar 22 05:50:48 2011 From: d.mareschal at bbk.ac.uk (Denis Mareschal) Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:50:48 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Masters in Central London Message-ID: Dear all, Please post/circulate to potentially interested students. DO NOT REPLY DIRECTLY TO THIS EMAIL. Best regards, Denis ============================================= NEW MASTERS PROGRAMME IN COGNITION AND COMPUTATION Birkbeck University of London Central London UK MA/MSc Cognition and Computation http://www.bbk.ac.uk/study/pg2011/psychology/TMACGCOM.html This programme studies the cognitive processes and representations underlying human thought, knowledge and behaviour. It integrates a wide range of disciplines and methodologies with the core assumption that human cognition is a computational process, implemented in neural hardware. The programme involves intensive training in experimental design and methodology, building computational models, and carrying out a substantial piece of original research. The course is suitable for students who wish to pursue a research career in cognitive modelling, cognitive science, cognitive engineering, and cognitive robotics. Graduates may also go on to careers in psychology, visual sciences, and other disciplines where computer simulation is used. -- ================================================= Professor Denis Mareschal Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development School of Psychology Birkbeck College University of London Malet St., London WC1E 7HX, UK tel +44 (0)20 7079-0751/7631-6582 reception: 7631-6207 fax +44 (0)20 7631-6312 http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psyc/staff/academic/dmareschal The Making of Human Concepts: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199549221.do Neuroconstructivism books: http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780198529910 http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780198529934 ================================================= -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110322/b7cfe7a2/attachment.html From d.mandic at imperial.ac.uk Fri Mar 25 11:47:37 2011 From: d.mandic at imperial.ac.uk (Danilo P. Mandic) Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:47:37 +0000 Subject: Connectionists: Fast code for multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) Message-ID: <4D8CB919.20504@imperial.ac.uk> Dear All, the following link may be of interest to the Connectionists community http://www.commsp.ee.ic.ac.uk/~mandic/research/emd.htm If you click on the 'Matlab' icon, you can download the Matlab code for multivariate EMD (MEMD), which is now up to 10 times faster. There are also some supporting *.m and *.mat files. MEMD extends the concept of single channel EMD, and allows you to simultaneously perform decomposition into oscillatory and AM/FM modes of any number of data channels - for instance you can use it to perform a simultaneous data-driven time-frequency analysis of a number of EEG channels. The multivariate IMFs have common oscillatory modes across all the data channels, which facilitates both artifact removal and data/feature fusion across the data channels. At the link above, there are articles using this method to analyse/fuse EEG, body motion from multiple 3D inertial bodysensors, and perform fusion of visual/thermal images and 'out of focus' image fusion. Enjoy Danilo -- Dr Danilo P. Mandic Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, United Kingdom Phone: +44 (0)207 594 6271 www.commsp.ee.ic.ac.uk/~mandic From honglak at eecs.umich.edu Fri Mar 25 10:54:03 2011 From: honglak at eecs.umich.edu (Honglak Lee) Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 10:54:03 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: ICML 2011 Workshop Learning Architectures, Representations, and Optimization for Speech and Visual Information Processing Message-ID: ===================================================================== CALL FOR PAPER ICML 2011 Workshop Learning Architectures, Representations, and Optimization for Speech and Visual Information Processing http://icml2011speechvision.wordpress.com/ Bellevue, Washington, USA, July 2, 2011 ===================================================================== Overview: In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in algorithms that learn hierarchical representations from unlabeled data. Unsupervised learning and deep learning methods, such as sparse coding, restricted Boltzmann machines, deep belief networks, convolutional architectures, recursive compositional models, and hierarchical generative models, have been successfully applied to a variety of tasks in computer vision and speech processing with highly promising results. In this workshop, we will bring together researchers who are interested in learning representations and architectures and in developing efficient and robust optimization algorithms for speech and visual information processing, review the recent technical progress, and discuss the challenges and future research directions. Detailed topics of presentations are expected to include (but not limited to) the followings: ? Development of learning models, e.g., deep belief nets, deep neural nets, deep Boltzmann machines, high-order sparse coding, hierarchical generative models, temporal and/or recursive models with deep structure, generative models motivated by physical processes of human speech production and of natural image formation, discriminative models motivated by human speech and visual perception, etc. ? Algorithms for probabilistic inference, optimization strategies when the objective is non-convex, and large-scale implementations associated with the above models. ? Learning biologically inspired feature hierarchies in human visual and auditory signal processing. ? Novel representations via the use of side information in unsupervised feature learning, e.g., spatial correlations in image, sequential dynamics and temporal/spectral correlations in speech, physical constraints in speech production, perceptual constraints in vision, and other additional prior knowledge, etc. ? Theoretical understanding on the role of unsupervised feature learning in building complex predictive models. Under which conditions does the feature hierarchy provide a better regularization or achieve a higher statistical efficiency? ? Success, failures, and lessons learned in real-world applications including understanding of natural scenes, recognition of objects and events, speech recognition under controlled environments, large-vocabulary speech recognition under realistic acoustic environments, auditory coding of speech and music, etc. If you are interested in presenting your work, please submit an extended abstract (1-2 pages in conference proceedings format) via email to icml2011ws.visionspeech at gmail.com. Accepted contributions will be presented as posters. Potential list of invited speakers: Andrew Ng (Stanford University) Fei-Fei Li (Stanford University) John Platt (Microsoft Research) Xuedong Huang (Microsoft) OTHER Invited SPEAKERS WAITING FOR CONFIRMATION Key Dates: Paper Submission Deadline: April 29, 2011 Paper Acceptance Notification: May 20, 2011 Camera Ready Submission: June 10, 2011 Workshop Date: July 02, 2011 Organizers Li Deng, Microsoft Research Honglak Lee, University of Michigan Kai Yu, NEC Laboratories America -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110325/8ef7d073/attachment.html From jancke at neurobiologie.rub.de Fri Mar 25 06:31:52 2011 From: jancke at neurobiologie.rub.de (dirk jancke) Date: 25 Mar 2011 11:31:52 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Propagation of gratings across primary visual cortex visualized with voltage-sensitive dye imaging Message-ID: <4D8C6F18.4060603@neurobiologie.rub.de> Dear colleagues, I would like to draw your attention to our recently published paper. Moving gratings have been used almost half a century to study the visual cortex. We show for the first time its retinotopic motion across the brain's surface in parallel to orientation maps. Onat S, Nortmann N, Rekauzke S, K?nig P, & Jancke D (2011). Independent encoding of grating motion across stationary feature maps in primary visual cortex visualized with voltage-sensitive dye imaging. Neuroimage 55: 1763-1770. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.01.004 The vizualization of such multiplexed activity patterns became possible by using optical imaging with voltage-sensive dye. download movie http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Dirk.Jancke/brain_multiplexing.html Abstract: In early visual cortex different stimulus parameters are represented in overlaid feature maps. Such functioning was extensively explored by the use of drifting gratings characterized by orientation, spatial?temporal frequency, and direction of motion. However surprisingly, the direct cortical visuotopic drift of the gratings' stripy pattern has never been detected simultaneously to these stationary feature maps. It therefore remains to be demonstrated how physical signals of grating motion across the cortex are represented independently of other parametric maps and thus, how multi-dimensional input is processed independently to enable effective read-out further downstream. Taking advantage of the high spatial and temporal resolution of voltage-sensitive dye imaging, we here show the real-time encoding of position and orientation. By decomposing the cortical responses to drifting gratings we visualize the typical emergence of stationary orientation maps in which specific domains exhibited highest amplitudes. Simultaneously to these patchy maps, we demonstrate coherently propagating waves of activity that precisely matched the actual movement of the gratings in space and time, most dominantly for spatial frequencies lower than the preferred range. Thus, the primary visual cortex multiplexes information about retinotopic motion by additional temporal modulation of stationary orientation signals. These signals may be used to variably extract coarse-grained object motion and form information at higher visual processing stages. Best regards, Dirk -- _________________________________________________ Dr. Dirk Jancke Bernstein Group for Computational Neuroscience Institut f?r Neuroinformatik, NB 2/27 Ruhr-University Bochum D-44780 Bochum Germany Fax: +49 (0)234-32-14209 Tel: +49 (0)234-32-29490/1(lab) -27845(office) email: jancke at neurobiologie.rub.de http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Dirk.Jancke _________________________________________________ From zhaoping at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk Fri Mar 25 08:07:32 2011 From: zhaoping at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk (Dr Zhaoping Li) Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:07:32 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Connectionists: call for participation/contribution to 3rd Beijing International Symposium on Computational Neuroscience July 13-14th, 2011 Message-ID: This symposium will be held on July 13-14, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China See http://cns.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/biscon11/ What: An intensive, high quality, two day symposium on computational neuroscience, organized by Tsinghua University Medical School, will feature presentations of theories, models, and theory/model- motivated experiments in neuroscience. Most presentations will be contributed posters, allowing extensive interactions and exchanges between participants. Additionally, there will be two tutorials and a few invited oral presentations (see below). The topics of interests include, but are not limited to, computational theories and models of vision or other sensory processes, motor control, learning, memory, and decision making; physiological and psychological experiments to test or develop computational theories, such as electrophysiology to test theories of visual attention, and human psychophysics to explore models of visual adaptation, inference, and perceptual learning; inter-disciplinary investigations in neural encoding and decoding, learning and plasticity, neural circuits and networks, etc. This symposium aims to encourage interaction between computational and experimental communities, and between the regional and international communities of computational neuroscience, and to foster and encourage interest among students and young researchers in this field. We hope that such interactions and exchanges will lead to collaborations between participants. Invited Tutorial and symposium speakers: Invited Tutorial speakers Jeremy Wolfe ? Visual search, experiments and models Mitsuo Kawato ?- Computational motor control and BMI There will be two hours of lectures on each topic on July 13th. Invited Symposium Speakers include: Mitsuo Kawato (ATR, Japan) ?- Perceptual learning incepted by decoded fMRI neurofeedback without visual stimulus presentation Guosong Liu (Tsinghua University, China) ? Enhancement of cognition Fred Wolf (Max Planck Institute for dynamics and self-organization, Goettingen, Germany) ? Title to be announced. Some names of the participants and contributors are Fang Fang (Peking University, China), Barbara Gilliam (University of New South Wales, Australia) Bo Hong (Tsinghua University, China), Zili Liu (UCLA, USA) Zuxiang Liu (Institute of biophysics, academic sinica, China) *Hiro Nakahara (RIKEN, Japan), Ning Qian (Columbia University, US), Sen Song (Tsinghua University, China), Taro Toyoizumi (RIKEN, Japan) *Doris Tsao (Caltech, USA) *Misha Tsodyks (Weismann Institute, Israel) Katsumi Watanabe (University of Tokyo, Japan) Si Wu (Institute of Neuroscience, China), Cong Yu (Beijing Normal University, China) Li Zhaoping (University College London, UK/Tsinghua University, China). (*, not confirmed) Symposium committee: Bo Hong, Ning Qian, Sen Song, and Li Zhaoping. For information for the past symposium (2009 and 2010), see http://cns.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/biscon10/ and http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Zhaoping.Li/BeijingMeeting2009.html Call for contributions and participations: Researchers and students are encouraged to contribute and participate in the symposium. Registration is required, early registration is recommended if you want to secure a place. To contribute a poster presentation, please submit an abstract (max 200 words) together with a one to two A4 page summary of the work in a pdf file at the registration website. Submission deadline is June 10th, 2010. The submissions will be reviewed by the symposium committee. Limited travel support funds are available to help some Chinese students and young researchers to participate in the symposium. Preference will be given to those who present their work. Please contact the symposium organization to apply for financial assistance for travel if needed. Registration: Registration is required to participate in the symposium, early registration is recommended if you want to secure a place. The registration is free for students who do not sign up for symposium dinner. For non-students, the registration costs 450 yuan (about 69 US dollars), or 200 yuan for students who like to sign up for symposium dinner. Receipts will be provided for all registration payments (payable ASAP or when you arrive at the symposium) received. Submission: Please go to Registration to submit poster contributions. Each submission requires an abstract (max 200 words) and a summary (1-2 A4 pages in a pdf file) of the work. Submission deadline is June 1st, 2010. The submissions will be reviewed by the symposium committee with decision about one week after the deadline. Enquiries: Please email biscon11 at gmail.com, or, for urgent enquiries to lizhaoping at tsinghua.edu.cn. Sponsorships: Tsinghua University Medical school, Tsinghua University Computational Neuroscience Laboratory, Tsinghua University. From marcel.van.gerven at gmail.com Mon Mar 28 08:44:29 2011 From: marcel.van.gerven at gmail.com (Marcel van Gerven) Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:44:29 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: PhD Student for fMRI decoding of mental state Message-ID: PhD Student for fMRI decoding of mental state We invite applications for a PhD position at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. You will be working on the NWO project Sparse Learning of Deep Models which aims to improve the decoding of what someone perceives or imagines from brain activity alone. In this project, you will develop probabilistic machine learning methods and collect fMRI data at the institute's 3 Tesla MRI facility. The project will be headed by Dr van Gerven in collaboration with Prof. Heskes (Computer Science) and Dr Thirion (Neuroimaging). You are highly motivated and have a Master?s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, or a related field of study. Experience with Matlab programming and data analysis is a must. Experience with functional magnetic resonance imaging and/or machine learning is highly desirable. You should have a demonstrated interest in and qualification for scientific research, be able to work in an interdisciplinary team in an international context, and have excellent writing skills in English. You will be appointed as a PhD student for a period of four years. Your performance will be evaluated after 18 months. If the evaluation is positive, the contract will be extended by 2.5 years. As part of the contract, you will participate in educational activities (i.e. teaching students). Formal application deadline is May 31st, but applications will be considered until the position is filled. Starting salary is ? 2,042 per month; the salary will increase to ? 2,612 per month in the fourth year. Strategically located in Europe, Radboud University Nijmegen is one of the leading academic communities in the Netherlands. A place with a personal touch, where top-flight education and research take place on a beautiful green campus in modern buildings with state-of-art facilities. The Faculty of Social Sciences is one of the largest faculties at Radboud University Nijmegen. The faculty currently employs about 650 employees. The faculty?s ambition is to become one of the top social science institutes in Europe, providing high-quality research programmes and study programmes that rank among the best in the Netherlands. The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour consists of three research centres, the Centre for Cognition, the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging and the Centre for Neuroscience. The Donders Institute focuses on state-of-the-art cognitive neuroscience, with a multidisciplinary approach, and offers excellent lab and neuroimaging facilities, PhD supervision and courses and technical support. The project is embedded within the research group Cognitive Artificial Intelligence, which is part of the Centre for Cognition. Contact information: dr. Marcel van Gerven m.vangerven at donders.ru.nl http://www.ru.nl/fsw Radboud University Nijmegen From ted.carnevale at yale.edu Wed Mar 30 17:30:55 2011 From: ted.carnevale at yale.edu (Ted Carnevale) Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:30:55 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: NEURON 2011 Summer Course Message-ID: <4D93A10F.2090801@yale.edu> COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT What: "The NEURON Simulation Environment" (NEURON 2011 Summer Course) http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2011/nscsd2011.html When: Saturday, June 18, through Wednesday, June 22, 2011 Where: The Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego, CA Organizers: N.T. Carnevale and M.L. Hines Description: This intensive hands-on course covers the design, construction, and use of models in the NEURON simulation environment. It is intended primarily for those who are concerned with models of biological neurons and neural networks that are closely linked to empirical observations, e.g. experimentalists who wish to incorporate modeling in their research plans, and theoreticians who are interested in the principles of biological computation. The course is designed to be useful and informative for registrants at all levels of experience, from those who are just beginning to those who are already quite familiar with NEURON or other simulation tools. Registration is limited to 20, and the deadline for receipt of applications is Wednesday, June 1, 2011. For more information see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2011/nscsd2011.html or contact Ted Carnevale Neurobiology Dept. Yale University School of Medicine PO Box 208001 New Haven, CT 06520-8001 phone 203-494-7381 email ted.carnevale at yale.edu Supported in part by: National Institutes of Health Institute for Neural Computation http://inc.ucsd.edu/ Contractual terms require inclusion of the following statement: This course is not sponsored by the University of California. From ahirose at ee.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp Wed Mar 30 05:05:55 2011 From: ahirose at ee.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp (Akira Hirose) Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 18:05:55 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: ICONIP 2011 Shanghai (International Conference on Neural Information Processing) Message-ID: <4D92F273.5030408@ee.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp> ================================================== Call for Special Sessions Proposals ICONIP 2011 Shanghai International Conference on Neural Information Processing http://iconip2011.sjtu.edu.cn/ 14-17 November, 2011, Shanghai, China ==================================================== 2011 International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2011) will be held in Shanghai, China. It is an annual event, organized since 1994 by the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). ICONIP 2011 aims to provide a high-level international forum for scientists, engineers, educators, and students to address new challenges, share solutions, and discuss future research directions in neural information processing and real-world applications. ::::Call for Special Sessions Proposals:::: Special sessions, to be organized by internationally recognized experts, aim to bring together researchers in special focused topics. Each special session should include at least 6 contributing papers. A special session proposal should include the session title, a brief description of the scope and motivation, names, contact information and brief biographical information on the organizers. Papers submitted for special sessions are to be peer-reviewed with the same criteria used for the regular papers. Deadline: April 1, 2011 (Special Session Proposal) June 1, 2011 (Submission of Papers) Details are given at http://iconip2011.sjtu.edu.cn/ From R.Bogacz at bristol.ac.uk Thu Mar 31 06:29:44 2011 From: R.Bogacz at bristol.ac.uk (Rafal Bogacz) Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:29:44 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: PhD studentships in decision making at Bristol Message-ID: <4D945798.6050101@bristol.ac.uk> Dear Colleagues, Five, 4-year studentships are available to study in a new EPSRC funded inter-disciplinary research centre in Decision Making in an Unstable World at the University of Bristol. Cross-disciplinary training will be provided in the first year, consisting of a personally tailored suite of taught courses and two mini-projects. The remainder of the project will consist of research leading to the award of a PhD in one of Computer Science, Experimental Psychology or Mathematics, with all research co-supervised by academics from these disciplines. Throughout the project there will be a wide variety of project focused seminars, workshops, and collaborative opportunities. Applications are welcomed from UK/EU students who are enthusiastic and highly-motivated who possess, or will shortly obtain, a first or upper second class degree, or equivalent, in a numerate subject from across the Mathematical, Natural, Engineering, Social and Biological Sciences. Applicants must demonstrate a strong desire to carry out interdisciplinary research combining mathematical and computational modelling with experimental research on humans. Successful applicants will receive an EPSRC 4-year studentship covering living expenses and fees. For further information, please visit http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~madsl/decision-making. Informal enquiries are encouraged and should be made to Dr David Leslie (david.leslie at bristol.ac.uk) or Prof Iain Gilchrist (i.d.gilchrist at bristol.ac.uk). Information about postgraduate study at the university, including the application procedure, is available at http://www.bris.ac.uk/prospectus/postgraduate/2011. Applications should be made for a PhD in Experimental Psychology, indicating that the application is in response to the "Inter-disciplinary decision-making studentships advertisement". Closing date for applications 2 May, interviews in the week of 16 May 2011. Best wishes, Rafal Bogacz From cardoso at bcos.uni-freiburg.de Thu Mar 31 08:16:37 2011 From: cardoso at bcos.uni-freiburg.de (Simone Cardoso de Oliveira) Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:16:37 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Brains for Brains Young Researchers' Computational Neuroscience Awards 2011 Message-ID: <4D9470A5.6060501@bcos.uni-freiburg.de> Dear colleagues, for the second time, the Bernstein Computational Neuroscience Association is announcing the "Brains for Brains Young Researchers' Computational Neuroscience Award". The call is open for researchers of any nationality who have contributed to a peer reviewed publication or peer reviewed conference abstract that resulted from research performed before the initiation of doctoral studies, is written in English and was accepted or published in 2010 or 2011. The award comprises 500 ? prize money, plus a travel grant of up to 1.500 ? to cover a one-week trip to Germany, including a talk at the Award Ceremony during the Bernstein Conference 2011 in Freiburg, and an individually planned visit to up to two German research institutions in Computational Neuroscience. Deadline for application is May 31, 2011. Detailed information about the application procedure can be found under: www.nncn.de/verein-en/brains4brains2011 Best regards, Simone Cardoso -- Dr. Simone Cardoso de Oliveira Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience Head of the Bernstein Coordination Site (BCOS) Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg Hansastr. 9A 79104 Freiburg, Germany phone: +49-761-203-9583 fax: +49-761-203-9585 cardoso at bcos.uni-freiburg.de www.nncn.de