ICCS'98 Focus Session

[Ali Minai]

                               ANNOUNCEMENT
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      Focus Session on Neural Computation, Cognition, and Complex Systems
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          Second International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS'98)
                               Nashua, NH
                           October 25-30, 1998
                 

A focus session on neural computation, cognition, and complex systems will
be held on Oct. 29, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m., as part of the Second International
Conference on Complex Systems. This invited session brings together a
group of researchers who are working at the active interface of complex
systems and neuroscience, and who have thought very deeply about these issues.
The session will be chaired by Prof. Walter Freeman, University of California,
Berkeley, who will give a keynote talk on the afternoon of Wednesday,
October 28. The speakers include:

Walter Freeman (University of California, Berkeley) - CHAIR
Steve Bressler (Center for Complex Systems, Florida Atlantic Univ.)
Michael Hasselmo (Boston University)
Jorge Jose (Northeastern University)
John Lisman (Volen Center for Complex Systems - Brandeis University)
Randy McIntosh (Rotman Research Institute, Toronto)
John Symons (Boston University)

The session will include presentations and a panel discussion. The
focus of discussion will be:


    How, and to what extent, can the study of spatio-temporal
         dynamics in the brain help explain cognition?


with the following specific issues:


1. What sort of dynamic processes and structures in the brain underlie
    the processes of cognition? At what scales do they occur, and are
    they subject to global principles of organization such as
    cooperation, competition, synchronization, etc. across scales?

2. What types of experiments do we need to probe these dynamic processes
    and construct useful neurobiologically grounded theories of cognitive
    function?

3. Is the theoretical/mathematical framework in which we model neural
    systems (e.g., compartmental models, local learning rules, patterns
    of activity, spike train statistics, etc.) sufficient to capture the
    processes of interest?

4. Are the emerging sciences of complexity, with ideas like self-organization,
    self-similarity, chaos, and scaling, likely to provide a useful paradigm
    for relating biology to cognition? How successful have attempts to
    apply these ideas been so far?

5. Is the information processing metaphor for the brain still a viable one,
    or should it be expanded/modified in some way?



The International Conference on Complex Systems is organized by the
New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), and is an important effort
to establish complex systems as a research area in its own right. The first
conference last year (also in Nashua) brought together several hundred people
and produced very animated discussions. In addition to the speakers at the
neural computation session, this year's conference speakers include Stephen
Kosslyn, Scott Kelso, Per Bak, Doyne Farmer, Phillip Anderson, Matt Wilson
and many others whose ideas speak to issues of interest to neural systems
researchers.

I will post more information on this as it becomes available. Interested
readers should check out the ICCS'98 website at http://necsi.org/html/iccs2.html
or send mail to iccs at necsi.org for information on registration, etc.


Ali A. Minai
Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory
Department of Electrical
   & Computer Engineering
               and Computer Science
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0030

Phone: (513) 556-4783
Fax:   (513) 556-7326
Email: Ali.Minai at uc.edu

Internet: http://www.ececs.uc.edu/~aminai/