ITB2 Call For Participation

[Simon Schultz]

		      Call for Participation: 

		Information Theory and the Brain II

		To be held on the 20-21st of September, 
		Headland Hotel, Newquay, Cornwall, England.

	     http://www.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk/~itb2/conference.html

This is the sequel to the conference held in Stirling, Scotland last year.
This year the conference will be held in the Cornish town of
Newquay. Apart from being one of the best areas for surfing in Europe, the
surrounding countryside is amongst the most beautiful in Britain. The
conference will be held in the spectacular Headland Hotel right next to
the famous Fistral Beach and in mid September the water is at its warmest,
the surf is starting to get larger, and the summer holiday crowds have
headed home. It is hoped that pleasant surroundings will help to maintain
an informal atmosphere.

Organising Committee:

Roland Baddeley (Chair)

Nick Chater 
Peter Foldiak 
Peter Hancock 
Bruno Olshausen 
Dan Ruderman 
Simon Schultz 
Guy Wallis

21 papers have been accepted for presentation at the conference. While
places are limited, there is still room for a number of non-presenting
attendees. Anyone who would like to attend the conference but who has not
submitted a paper is now encouraged to contact the organisers, either by
email at itb2 at psy.ox.ac.uk, or by surface mail to:

IBT2 c/o Roland Baddeley,
Dept of Psychology,
University of Oxford,
Oxford,
England
OX1 3UD


Registration will be 40 pounds (about $60 U.S.) with the participants
expected to find their own accommodation. This varies in price from as low
as 5 pounds (for the most basic) upwards. Accommodation in the summer can
be hard to find but by the 20th, most summer holidays have finished and
the situation is much better. More information on accommodation, and on
travel to Newquay, can be found via the above mentioned web page.


A tentative conference program follows. More details of the conference,
and abstracts of the papers, are available via the web page.

DAY ONE. Friday 20th September.

Session 1: Applied physiology

Adaptive search for most effective stimuli
-- Maneesh Sahani

Dynamics of receptive fields in the visual system: plasticity of
intra-cortical connections
-- G. Mato and N. Parga

Session 2: Psychological models

Modelling the vowel space: Relating a statistical model to results
obtained in experimental phonetics 
-- Matthew Aylett

Who needs neural networks when we've got information theory? (or "The
emperors new neural network model")
-- John A. Bullinaria

Optimal resource allocation for novelty detection - the principle and some
experimental MEG support related to a human auditory memory
-- Janne Sinkkonen

Session 3: Formal analysis of the hippocampus

A quantitative model of information processing in CA1
-- Carlo Fulvi Mari, Stefano Panzeri, Edmund Rolls and Alessandro Treves

Information-theoretic analysis of hippocampal subfield CA1:
Schaffer-collateral connectivity
-- Simon Schultz, Stefano Panzeri, Edmund Rolls and Alessandro Treves

Session 4: Information, energy and the world

The metabolic cost of sensory information
-- Simon Laughlin, David O'Carroll and John Anderson

Metabolicly optimal rate codes and the time course of visual processing
-- Roland Baddeley

DAY TWO. Saturday 21st September.

Session 5: Network models I

Information Density and Cortical Magnification Factors
-- M D Plumbley

Time to learn about objects
-- Guy Wallis

Stochastic dynamics of a neuron with quantal synaptic noise
-- Paul C. Bressloff and Peter Roper

Session 6: Sparse representations

Experiments with Low Entropy Neural Networks
-- George Harpur and Richard Prager

Utilizing Sparse Coding and Metrical Organization of Features for
Artificial Object Recognition
-- Norbert Kr\"uger, Gabi Peters, Michael P\"otzsch

The role of higher-order image statistics in human visual coding
-- Mitchell Thomson

Session 7: Network models II

Quantifying the level of distribution present in a feed-forward
neural network
-- Antony Browne

The Emergence of Dominance Stripes in a Network of Firing Neurons
-- S P Luttrell

Session 8: Vision

The taming of natural intensities by the early visual system of the
blowfly
-- J.H. van Hateren

Optimizing photoreceptor arrays in apposition compound eyes
-- Daniel L. Ruderman and Simon B. Laughlin

Image coding in primary visual cortex using long-range horizontal
collaterals
-- Darragh Smyth and W.A.Phillips

Session 9: Posters

Predicting natural intensities viewed by photoreceptors
-- A. van der Schaaf and J.H. van Hateren