Graduate Program in The Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS) at Boston University

[Faramarz Valafar]

PLEASE POST

*******************************************************************

                  	      GRADUATE TRAINING IN THE
                DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SYSTEMS (CNS)
                  	          AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY

*******************************************************************

The Boston University Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems
offers comprehensive graduate training in the neural and computational
principles, mechanisms, and architectures that underlie human and
animal behavior, and the application of neural network architectures
to the solution of technological problems.

Applications for Fall 2000 admission and financial aid are now being
accepted for both the MA and PhD degree programs.

To obtain a brochure describing the CNS Program and a set of application
materials, write, telephone, or fax:

DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SYSTEMS
Boston University
677 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02215

617/353-9481 (phone)
617/353-7755 (fax)

or send via e-mail your full name and mailing address to the attention
of Mr. Robin Amos at:

                        inquiries at cns.bu.edu

Applications for admission and financial aid should be received by the
Graduate School Admissions Office no later than January 15.  Late
applications will be considered until May 1; after that date
applications will be considered only as special cases.

Applicants are required to submit undergraduate (and, if applicable,
graduate) transcripts, three letters of recommendation, and Graduate
Record Examination (GRE) scores. The Advanced Test should be in the
candidate's area of departmental specialization. GRE scores may be
waived for MA candidates and, in exceptional cases, for PhD
candidates, but absence of these scores will decrease an applicant's
chances for admission and financial aid.

Non-degree students may also enroll in CNS courses on a part-time
basis.

Stephen Grossberg, Chairman
Gail A. Carpenter, Director of Graduate Studies

Description of the CNS Department:

The Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS) provides advanced
training and research experience for graduate students interested in
the neural and computational principles, mechanisms, and
architectures that underlie human and animal behavior, and the
application of neural network architectures to the solution of
outstanding technological problems. Students are trained in a broad
range of areas concerning computational neuroscience, cognitive
science, and neuromorphic systems, including the brain mechanisms of
vision and visual object recognition; audition, speech, and language
understanding; recognition, learning, categorization, and long-term
memory; cognitive information processing; self-organization and
development; navigation, planning, and spatial orientation;
cooperative and competitive network dynamics and short-term memory;
reinforcement and motivation; attention; adaptive sensory-motor
control and robotics; biological rhythms; consciousness; mental
disorders; and the mathematical and computational methods needed to
support advanced modeling research and applications. The CNS
Department awards MA, PhD, and BA/MA degrees.

The CNS Department embodies a number of unique features. It has
developed a curriculum that consists of eighteen interdisciplinary
graduate courses, each of which integrates the psychological,
neurobiological, mathematical, and computational information needed
to theoretically investigate fundamental issues concerning mind and
brain processes and the applications of neural networks to
technology. Additional advanced courses, including research
apprenticeship and seminar courses, are also offered. Each course is
typically taught once a week in the afternoon or evening to make the
program available to qualified students, including working
professionals, throughout the Boston area. Students develop a
coherent area of expertise by designing a program that includes
courses in areas such as biology, computer science, engineering,
mathematics, and psychology, in addition to courses in the CNS
curriculum.

The CNS Department interacts with colleagues in several Boston
University research centers or groups, and with Boston-area
scientists collaborating with these centers. The unit most closely
linked to the department is the Center for Adaptive Systems.
Students interested in neural network hardware can work with
researchers in CNS, at the College of Engineering, and at M.I.T.
Lincoln Laboratory. Other research resources include distinguished
research groups in neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and neuropharmacology
across the Boston University Charles River Campus and Medical School;
in sensory robotics, biomedical engineering, computer and systems
engineering, and neuromuscular research within the College of
Engineering; in dynamical systems within the Mathematics Department;
in theoretical computer science within the Computer Science
Department; and in biophysics and computational physics within the
Physics Department. Key colleagues in these units hold appointments
in CNS.

In addition to its basic research and training program, the
department conducts a seminar series, as well as conferences and
symposia, which bring together distinguished scientists from both
experimental, theoretical, and applied disciplines.

The department is housed in its own new four-story building which
includes ample space for faculty and student offices and laboratories
(computational neuroscience, visual psychophysics, psychoacoustics,
speech and language, sensory-motor control, neurobotics, computer
vision), as well as an auditorium, classroom and seminar rooms, a
library, and a faculty-student lounge. The department has a powerful
computer network for carrying out large-scale simulations of
behavioral and brain models.

Below are listed departmental faculty, courses and labs.


FACULTY AND STAFF OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE AND NEURAL
SYSTEMS AND CENTER FOR ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

Jelle Atema
Professor of Biology
Director, Boston University Marine Program (BUMP)
PhD, University of Michigan
Sensory physiology and behavior.

Aijaz Baloch
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Senior Modeling Engineer, Nestor, Inc.
PhD, Electrical Engineering, Boston University
Visual motion perception, computational vision, adaptive control,
and financial fraud detection.

Helen Barbas
Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Boston University School of Medicine
PhD, Physiology/Neurophysiology, McGill University
Organization of the prefrontal cortex, evolution of the neocortex.

Jacob Beck
Research Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Psychology, Cornell University
Visual perception, psychophysics, computational models of vision.

Daniel H. Bullock
Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems, and Psychology
PhD, Experimental Psychology, Stanford University
Sensory-motor performance and learning, voluntary control of
action, serial order and timing, cognitive development.

Gail A. Carpenter
Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Mathematics
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Mathematics, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Learning and memory, synaptic processes, pattern recognition,
remote sensing, medical database analysis, machine learning,
differential equations.

Laird Cermak
Director, Memory Disorders Research Center, Boston Veterans Affairs
Medical Center
Professor of Neuropsychology, School of Medicine
Professor of Occupational Therapy, Sargent College
PhD, Ohio State University
Memory disorders.

Michael A. Cohen
Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Computer Science
PhD, Psychology, Harvard University
Speech and language processing, measurement theory, neural
modeling, dynamical systems, cardiovascular oscillations
physiology and time series.

H. Steven Colburn
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
PhD, Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Audition, binaural interaction, auditory virtual environments,
signal processing models of hearing.

Howard Eichenbaum
Professor of Psychology
PhD, Psychology, University of Michigan
Neurophysiological studies of how the hippocampal system mediates
declarative memory.

William D. Eldred III
Professor of Biology
PhD, University of Colorado, Health Science Center
Visual neuralbiology.

Paolo Gaudiano
Research Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University
Computational and neural models of robotics, vision, adaptive
sensory-motor control, and behavioral neurobiology.

Jean Berko Gleason
Professor of Psychology
PhD, Harvard University
Psycholinguistics.

Sucharita Gopal
Associate Professor of Geography
PhD, University of California at Santa Barbara
Neural networks, computational modeling of behavior, geographical
information systems, fuzzy sets, and spatial cognition.

Stephen Grossberg
Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering
Chairman, Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Director, Center for Adaptive Systems
PhD, Mathematics, Rockefeller University
Vision, audition, language, learning and memory, reward and
motivation, cognition, development, sensory-motor control,
mental disorders, applications.

Frank Guenther
Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University
MSE, Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Speech production, speech perception, biological sensory-motor
control and functional brain imaging.

Catherine L. Harris
Assistant Professor of Psychology
PhD, Cognitive Science and Psychology, University of California at San Diego
Visual word recognition, psycholinguistics, cognitive semantics,
second language acquisition, computational models of cognition.

Michael E. Hasselmo
Associate Professor of Psychology
Director of Graduate Studies, Psychology Department
PhD, Experimental Psychology, Oxford University
Electrophysiological studies of neuromodulatory effects in
cortical structures, network biophysical simulations of memory
function in hippocampus and piriform cortex, behavioral studies
of amnestic drugs.

Thomas G. Kincaid
Professor of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering, College of
Engineering
PhD, Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Signal and image processing, neural networks, non-destructive testing.

Mark Kon
Professor of Mathematics
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Neural network theory, complexity theory, wavelet theory, mathematical
physics.

Nancy Kopell
Professor of Mathematics
PhD, Mathematics, University of California at Berkeley
Dynamics of networks of neurons.

Jacqueline A. Liederman
Associate Professor of Psychology
PhD, Psychology, University of Rochester
Dynamics of interhemispheric cooperation; prenatal correlates of
neurodevelopmental disorders.

Ennio Mingolla
Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Psychology
PhD, Psychology, University of Connecticut
Visual perception, mathematical modeling of visual processes.

Joseph Perkell
Adjunct Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Senior Research Scientist, Research Lab of Electronics and
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Motor control of speech production.

Alan Peters
Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, School of Medicine
PhD, Zoology, Bristol University, United Kingdom
Organization of neurons in the cerebral cortex; effects of aging
on the primate brain; fine structure of the nervous system.

Andrzej Przybyszewski
Research Fellow, Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester
PhD, Warsaw Medical Academy
Electrophysiology of the primate visual system, mathematical and
computer modeling of the neuronal networks in the visual system.

Adam Reeves
Adjunct Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University
PhD, Psychology, City University of New York
Psychophysics, cognitive psychology, vision.

Mark Rubin
Research Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Physics, University of Chicago
Pattern recognition; artificial and biological vision.

Michele Rucci
Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Scuola Superiore, Pisa, Italy
Vision, sensory-motor control and learning, and computational neuroscience.

Elliot Saltzman
Associate Professor of Physical Therapy, Sargent College
Research Scientist, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT
Assistant Professor in Residence, Department of Psychology and Center for
the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut,
Storrs, CT
PhD, Developmental Psychology, University of Minnesota
Modeling and experimental studies of human sensorimotor control
and coordination of the limbs and speech articulators, focusing
on issues of timing in skilled activities.

Robert Savoy
Adjunct Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Scientist, Rowland Institute for Science
Experimental Psychologist, Massachusetts General Hospital
PhD, Experimental Psychology, Harvard University
Computational neuroscience; visual psychophysics of color, form,
and motion perception.  Teaching about functional MRI and other
brain mapping methods.

Eric Schwartz
Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems; Electrical, Computer
and Systems Engineering; and Anatomy and Neurobiology
PhD, High Energy Physics, Columbia University
Computational neuroscience, machine vision, neuroanatomy, neural modeling.

Robert Sekuler
Adjunct Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering,
BioMolecular Engineering Research Center
Frances and Louis H. Salvage Professor of Psychology, Brandeis University
Consultant in neurosurgery, Boston Children's Hospital
PhD, Psychology, Brown University
Visual motion, brain imaging, relation of visual perception, memory,
and movement.

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Biomedical
Engineering
PhD, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Psychoacoustics, audition, auditory localization, binaural
hearing, sensorimotor adaptation, mathematical models of human
performance.

Malvin Carl Teich
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering
and Physics
PhD, Cornell University
Quantum optics and imaging, photonics, wavelets and fractal
stochastic processes, biological signal processing and
information transmission.

Lucia Vaina
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Research Professor of Neurology, School of Medicine
PhD, Sorbonne (France); Dres Science, National Politechnique
Institute, Toulouse (France)
Computational visual neuroscience, biological and computational
learning, functional and structural neuroimaging.

Faramarz Valafar
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Electrical Engineering, Purdue University
Bioinformatics, adaptive systems (artificial neural networks),
data mining and modeling in medicine, medical decision making,
pattern recognition and signal processing in biomedicine,
biochemistry, and glycoscience.

Takeo Watanabe
Associate Professor of Psychology
PhD, Behavioral Sciences, University of Tokyo
Perception of objects and motion and effects of attention on
perception using psychophysics and brain imaging (f-MRI).

Allen Waxman
Adjunct Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Senior Staff Scientist, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
PhD, Astrophysics, University of Chicago
Visual system modeling, multisensor fusion, image mining,
parallel computing, and advanced visualization.

James Williamson
Research Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
PhD, Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University
Pattern recognition; self-organization and topographic maps;
perceptual grouping.

Jeremy Wolfe
Adjunct Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Associate Professor of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School
Psychophysicist, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Surgery Dept.
Director of Psychophysical Studies, Center for Clinical Cataract Research
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Visual attention, preattentive and attentive object representation.

Curtis Woodcock
Professor of Geography
Director, Geographic Applications, Center for Remote Sensing
PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara
Biophysical remote sensing, particularly of forests and natural
vegetation, canopy reflectance models and their inversion,
spatial modeling, and change detection; biogeography; spatial
analysis; geographic information systems; digital image
processing.


CNS DEPARTMENT COURSE OFFERINGS

CAS CN500  Computational Methods in Cognitive and Neural Systems
CAS CN510  Principles and Methods of Cognitive and Neural Modeling I
CAS CN520  Principles and Methods of Cognitive and Neural Modeling II
CAS CN530  Neural and Computational Models of Vision
CAS CN540  Neural and Computational Models of Adaptive Movement Planning
                        and Control
CAS CN550  Neural and Computational Models of Recognition, Memory and
Attention
CAS CN560  Neural and Computational Models of Speech Perception and
Production
CAS CN570  Neural and Computational Models of Conditioning, Reinforcement,
                        Motivation and Rhythm
CAS CN580  Introduction to Computational Neuroscience
GRS CN700  Computational and Mathematical Methods in Neural Modeling
GRS CN710  Advanced Topics in Neural Modeling
GRS CN720  Neural and Computational Models of Planning and Temporal
Structure
                        in Behavior
GRS CN730  Models of Visual Perception
GRS CN740  Topics in Sensory-Motor Control
GRS CN760  Topics in Speech Perception and Recognition
GRS CN780  Topics in Computational Neuroscience
GRS CN810  Topics in Cognitive and Neural Systems: Visual Event Perception
GRS CN811  Topics in Cognitive and Neural Systems: Visual Perception

GRS CN911,912
Research in Neural Networks for Adaptive Pattern Recognition
GRS CN915,916
Research in Neural Networks for Vision and Image Processing
GRS CN921,922
Research in Neural Networks for Speech and Language Processing
GRS CN925,926
Research in Neural Networks for Adaptive Sensory-Motor Planning
and Control
GRS CN931,932
Research in Neural Networks for Conditioning and Reinforcement Learning
GRS CN935,936
Research in Neural Networks for Cognitive Information Processing
GRS CN941,942
Research in Nonlinear Dynamics of Neural Networks
GRS CN945,946
Research in Technological Applications of Neural Networks
GRS CN951,952
Research in Hardware Implementations of Neural Networks

CNS students also take a wide variety of courses in related departments.
In addition, students participate in a weekly colloquium series, an informal
lecture series, and student-run special interest groups, and attend lectures
and meetings throughout the Boston area; and advanced students work in small
research groups.


LABORATORY AND COMPUTER FACILITIES

The department is funded by fellowships, grants, and contracts from
federal agencies and private foundations that support research in
life sciences, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and engineering.
Facilities include laboratories for experimental research and
computational modeling in visual perception; audition, speech and
language processing; and sensory-motor control and robotics. Data
analysis and numerical simulations are carried out on a state-of-the-art
computer network comprised of Sun workstations, Silicon Graphics
workstations, Macintoshes, and PCs. A PC farm running Linix operating
systems is available as a distributed computational environment.
All students have access to PCs or UNIX workstation consoles, a network
of SGI machines, and standard modeling and mathematical simulation
packages such as Mathematica, VisSim, Khoros, and Matlab.

The department maintains a core collection of books and journals, and
has access both to the Boston University libraries and to the many
other collections of the Boston Library Consortium.

In addition, several specialized facilities and software are
available for use. These include:

Computer Vision/Computational Neuroscience Laboratory
The Computer Vision/Computational Neuroscience Lab is comprised of an
electronics workshop, including a surface-mount workstation, PCD
fabrication tools, and an Alterra EPLD design system; a light machine
shop; an active vision lab including actuators and video hardware;
and systems for computer aided neuroanatomy and application of
computer graphics and image processing to brain sections and MRI
images.

Neurobotics Laboratory
The Neurobotics Lab utilizes wheeled mobile robots to study potential
applications of neural networks in several areas, including adaptive
dynamics and kinematics, obstacle avoidance, path planning and
navigation, visual object recognition, and conditioning and
motivation. The lab currently has three Pioneer robots equipped with
sonar and visual sensors; one B-14 robot with a moveable camera,
sonars, infrared, and bump sensors; and two Khepera miniature robots
with infrared proximity detectors.

Psychoacoustics Laboratory
The Psychoacoustics Lab houses a newly installed, 8 ft. % 8 ft.
sound-proof booth. The laboratory is  extensively equipped to perform
both traditional psychoacoustic experiments and experiments using
interactive auditory virtual-reality stimuli. The major equipment
dedicated to the psychoacoustics laboratory includes two
Pentium-based personal computers; two Power-PC-based Macintosh
computers; a 50-MHz array processor capable of generating auditory
stimuli in real time; programmable attenuators; analog-to-digital and
digital-to-analog converters; a real-time head tracking system; a
special-purpose, signal-processing hardware system capable of
generating "spatialized" stereo auditory signals in real time; a
two-channel oscilloscope; a two-channel spectrum analyzer; various
cables, headphones, and other miscellaneous electronics equipment;
and software for signal generation, experimental control, data
analysis, and word processing.

Sensory-Motor Control Laboratory
The Sensory-Motor Control Lab supports experimental studies of motor
kinematics. An infrared WatSmart system allows measurement of
large-scale movements, and a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet
allows studies of handwriting and other fine-scale movements.
Equipment includes a 40-inch monitor that allows computer display of
animations generated by an SGI workstation or a Pentium Pro (Windows
NT) workstation. A second major component is a helmet-mounted,
video-based, eye-head tracking system (ISCAN Corp, 1997). The
latter's camera samples eye position at 240Hz and also allows
reconstruction of what subjects are attending to as they freely scan
a scene under normal lighting. Thus the system affords a wide range
of visuo-motor studies.

Speech and Language Laboratory
The Speech and Language Lab includes facilities for analog-to-digital
and digital-to-analog software conversion. Ariel equipment allows
reliable synthesis and playback of speech waveforms. An Entropic
signal processing package provides facilities for detailed analysis,
filtering, spectral construction, and formant tracking of the speech
waveform. Various large databases, such as TIMIT and TIdigits, are
available for testing algorithms of speech recognition.  For high
speed processing, supercomputer facilities speed filtering and data
analysis.

Visual Psychophysics Laboratory
The Visual Psychophysics Lab occupies an 800-square-foot suite,
including three dedicated rooms for data collection, and houses a
variety of computer controlled display platforms, including Silicon
Graphics, Inc. (SGI) Onyx RE2, SGI Indigo2 High Impact, SGI Indigo2
Extreme, Power Computing (Macintosh compatible) PowerTower Pro 225,
and Macintosh 7100/66 workstations. Ancillary resources for visual
psychophysics include a computer-controlled video camera, stereo
viewing glasses, prisms, a photometer, and a variety of
display-generation, data-collection, and data-analysis software.

Affiliated Laboratories
Affiliated CAS/CNS faculty have additional laboratories ranging from
visual and auditory psychophysics and neurophysiology, anatomy, and
neuropsychology to engineering and chip design. These facilities are
used in the context of faculty/student collaborations.


*******************************************************************

DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SYSTEMS
GRADUATE TRAINING ANNOUNCEMENT

Boston University
677 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02215

Phone: 617/353-9481
Fax:   617/353-7755
Email: inquiries at cns.bu.edu
Web: http://www.cns.bu.edu/
*******************************************************************