Connectionists: Call for Abstracts: NIPS Workshop 2008

[Arno Onken]

You are invited to participate in the post-conference NIPS workshop
"Statistical Analysis and Modeling of Response Dependencies in Neural
Populations", taking place in Whistler, Canada, on December 12-13, 2008.

It is well known that sensory and motor information is represented in
the activity of large populations of neurons. Encoding and decoding is
subject of active research. The two dominant theories of neural coding
are rate and temporal coding. They are studied by considering the
dependencies between responses of several neurons. In the typical
theoretical framework, response dependencies are characterized by
correlation coefficients and cross-correlograms. The main goal of this
workshop is to challenge the dependency concepts that are typically
applied and to disseminate more sophisticated concepts to a wider
public. It will bring together experts from different fields and
encourage exchange of insights between experimentalists and theoreticians.

To participate in the workshop please submit an extended abstract as a
two-page PDF attachment via email to aonken at cs.tu-berlin.de. The
deadline for submission is October 15.

The workshop chairs will select a couple of abstracts for oral
presentation at the workshop. The other abstracts will be presented as
posters on December 12.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Whistler.

Klaus Obermayer, Valentin Dragoi, Arno Onken, Steffen Gruenewaelder and
Denise Berger
(Workshop organizers)


List of speakers (confirmed):
    * Wyeth Bair (University of Oxford)
    * Jeff Beck (University of Rochester)
    * Pietro Berkes (Brandeis University)
    * Valentin Dragoi (University of Texas, Workshop Chair)
    * Arnulf Graf (New York University)
    * Sonja Grün (RIKEN Brain Science Institute)
    * Rick Jenison (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
    * Dimitris Karlis (Athens University)
    * Stephen Lisberger (University of California, San Francisco)
    * Jakob Macke (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics)
    * Naoki Masuda (University of Tokyo)

Workshop URL: http://ni.cs.tu-berlin.de/projects/nips2008/