Post-NIPS workshop on Associative Memory

[Jay Buckingham]

There will be a 1-day post-NIPS workshop on Associative Memory this
year.  This is a short summary of what we plan to do.

           NEUROBIOLOGICALLY MOTIVATED ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY 

The 1990 ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY workshop will focus on theoretical issues
relevant to the understanding of neurobiologically motivated associative 
memory models.  We are organizing it into a set of discussions on key
issues.  In these discussions the workshop participants can explain
how they have addressed the issue at hand in their work and hopefully
improve their understanding via exchange with others.  What we want
are nuts-and-bolts discussions among people who have wrestled with
these topics.

Some of the key issues are:
- Architectures for associative memories, with emphasis on partially
  connected, biologically motivated models, including multi-stage or
  modular architectures.
- Synaptic learning rules
- Performance measures and capacity
- Information theoretic issues such as information efficiency
- Thresholding techniques
- Biological relevance of these models
  (Discussing, for example, how David Marr made functional statements about
  the cerebellum, hippocampus and neocortex with associative memory
  models.)

This list is not exhaustive and the items are interrelated so we
expect them to come up in various contexts.  We will probably begin
each discussion by formulating a few questions that the participants
can address.  So come with your questions about these topics and your
ways of thinking about them.


Jay Buckingham
Cognitive Neuroscience
University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  SCOTLAND
Phone: (44 or 0) 31 667 1011 ext 6302
E-mail: jt%ed.cns at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk