From retienne at jhu.edu Fri Jan 2 07:43:01 2009 From: retienne at jhu.edu (retienne) Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:43:01 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: 2009 Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop Announcement Message-ID: <495E0BD5.8040800@jhu.edu> NEUROMORPHIC COGNITION ENGINEERING WORKSHOP www.ine-web.org Sunday June 28th - Saturday July 18th, 2009, Telluride, Colorado Organizers: Ralph Etienne-Cummings, Johns Hopkins University Timothy Horiuchi, University of Maryland, College Park Tobi Delbruck, Institute for Neuroinformatics, Zurich 2009 Topic Leaders: Cognitive Systems: Gregor SCHOENER (Ruhr-Universit?t-Bochum) and Josh BONGARD (Univ. Vermont) Robotics/Locomotion/Motor: Javier MOVELLAN (UC San Diego) and Tony LEWIS (Univ. Arizona) Vision: Bert SHI (HKUST) and Shih-chii LIU (INI-Zurich) Audition: Mounya EL HILALI (JHU) and Hynek HERMANSKY (JHU) Technology/Techniques/Tutorials: Paul HASLER (GA Tech) and Jon TAPSON (Univ. Capetown) Neuromorphic VLSI: John HARRIS (Univ. Florida) and John ARTHUR (Stanford Univ.) Computational Neuroscience: Terry SEJNOWSKI (Salk Institute) Workshop Advisory Board: Andre van SCHAIK(University of Sydney) Avis COHEN (University of Maryland) Barbara SHINN-CUNNINGHAM (Boston University) Giacomo INDIVERI (Institute of Neuroinformatics, UNI/ETH Zurich, Switzerland) Rodney DOUGLAS (Institute of Neuroinformatics, UNI/ETH Zurich, Switzerland) Shihab SHAMMA (University of Maryland) We invite applications for a three-week summer workshop that will be held in Telluride, Colorado from Sunday June 28th - Saturday July 18th, 2009. The application deadline is *Friday, March 1st* and application instructions are described at the bottom of this document. The 2009 Workshop and Summer School on Neuromorphic Engineering is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Institute of Neuromorphic Engineering, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Institute for Neuroinformatics - University and ETH Zurich, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Maryland - College Park, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University, University of Sydney, and the Salk Institute. Previous year workshop can be found at: http://ine-web.org/workshops/workshops-overview/index.html and last year's wiki is https://neuromorphs.net/ws2008/ . GOALS: Neuromorphic engineers design and fabricate artificial neural systems whose organizing principles are based on those of biological nervous systems. Over the past 12 years, this research community has focused on the understanding of low-level sensory processing and systems infrastructure; efforts are now expanding to apply this knowledge and infrastructure to addressing higher-level problems in perception, cognition, and learning. Inthis 3-week intensive workshop and through the Institute for Neuromorphic Engineering (INE), the mission is to promote interaction between seniorand junior researchers; to educate new members of the community; to introduce new enabling fields and applications to the community; to promote on-going collaborative activities emerging from the Workshop, and to promote a self-sustaining research field. FORMAT: The three week summer workshop will include background lectures on systems and cognitive neuroscience (in particular sensory processing, learning and memory, motor systems and attention), practical tutorials on analog VLSI design, mobile robots, hands-on projects, and special interest groups. Participants are required to take part and possibly complete at leastone of the projects proposed. They are furthermore encouraged to become involved in as many of the other activities proposed as interest and timeallow. There will be two lectures in the morning that cover issues that are important to the community in general. Because of the diverse range of backgrounds among the participants, some of these lectures will be tutorials, rather than detailed reports of current research. These lectures will be given by invited speakers. Projects and interest groups meet in the late afternoons, and after dinner. In the early afternoon there will be tutorials on a wide spectrum of topics, including analog VLSI, mobile robotics, auditory systems, central-pattern-generators, selective attention mechanisms, cognitive systems, etc. LOCATION AND ARRANGEMENTS: The summer school will take place in the small town of Telluride, 9000 feet high in Southwest Colorado, about 6 hours drive away from Denver (350 miles). Great Lakes Aviation and America West Express airlines provide daily flights directly into Telluride. All facilities within the beautifully renovated public school building are fully accessible to participants with disabilities. Participants will be housed in ski condominiums, withinwalking distance of the school. Participants are expected to share condominiums. The workshop is intended to be very informal and hands-on. Participants are not required to have had previous experience in analog VLSI circuit design, computational or machine vision, systems level neurophysiology or modeling the brain at the systems level. However, we strongly encourage active researchers with relevant backgrounds from academia, industry and national laboratories to apply, in particular if they are prepared to work on specific projects, talk about their own work or bring demonstrations to Telluride (e.g. robots, chips, software). Wireless internet access will be provided. Technical staff present throughout the workshops will assist with software and hardware issues. We will have a network of PCs running LINUX and Microsoft Windows for the workshop projects. We encourage participants to bring along their personal laptop. No cars are required. Given the small size of the town, we recommend thatyou do not rent a car. Bring hiking boots, warm clothes, rain gear, and a backpack, since Telluride is surrounded by beautiful mountains. Unless otherwise arranged with one of the organizers, we expect participants to stay for the entire duration of this three week workshop. ------ FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS: ------ Notification of acceptances will be mailed out around mid March 2009. The Workshop covers all your accommodations and facilities costs. You areresponsible for your own travel to the Workshop. For expenses not covered by federal funds, a Workshop registration fee is required. The fee is $550 per participant, however, due to the difference in travel cost, we offer a discount to non-US participants. European registration fees will bereduced to $300; non-US/non-European registration fees will be reduced to $150. The cost of a shared condominium will be covered for all academicparticipants but upgrades to a private room will cost extra. Participants from National Laboratories and Industry are expected to pay for these condominiums. ------ HOW TO APPLY: ------- Applicants should be at the level of graduate students or above (i.e. postdoctoral fellows, faculty, research and engineering staff and the equivalent positions in industry and national laboratories). We actively encourage women and minority candidates to apply. Anyone interested in proposing specific projects should contact the appropriate topic leaders directly. The application website is (after January 1st, 2009): http://ine-web.org/telluride-conference-2009/apply-info Application will include: * First name, Last name, Affiliation, valid e-mail address. * Curriculum Vitae. * One page summary of background and interests relevant to the workshop, including possible ideas for workshop projects. * Two letters of recommendation (uploaded directly by references). The application deadline is March 1, 2009. Applicants will be notified by e-mail. 1 January, 2009 - Applications accepted on website 1 March, 2009 - Applications Due mid-March - Notification of Acceptance (v6-24.12.2008) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Etienne-Cummings Associate Professor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 105 Barton Hall/3400 N. Charles St. Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218 Email: retienne at jhu.edu E URL: http://etienne.ece.jhu.edu/~etienne Tel: 410 - 516 - 3494 Fax: 410 - 516 - 5566 From terry at salk.edu Mon Jan 5 14:17:36 2009 From: terry at salk.edu (Terry Sejnowski) Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:17:36 -0800 Subject: Connectionists: NEURAL COMPUTATION - February, 2009 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Neural Computation - Contents - Volume 21, Number 2 - February 1, 2009 ARTICLE A Spiking Neural Network Model of an Actor-critic Learning Agent Wiebke Potjans, Abigail Morrison, and Markus Diesmann NOTE A Gradient Learning Rule for the Tempotron Robert Urbanczik and Walter Senn LETTERS Simplicity and Efficiency of Integrate-and-Fire Neuron Models Hans Plesser and Markus Diesmann Spike Train Statistics and Dynamics with Synaptic Input from any Renewal Process: A Population Density Approach Cheng Ly and Dan Tranchina Generating Spike Trains with Specified Correlation Coefficients Jakob Macke, Philipp Berens, Alexander Ecker, Andreas Tolias and Matthias Bethge A Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space Framework for Spike Trains Antonio Paiva, Il Park and Jose Principe Identifying Functional Connectivity in Large Scale Neural Ensemble Recordings: A Multiscale Data Mining Approach Karim Oweiss, Seif Eldawlatly and Rong Jin State Dependent Computation Using Coupled Recurrent Networks Ueli Rutishauser and Rodney Douglas The Problem of Rapid Variable Creation Robert Hadley Nonparametric Conditional Density Estimation Using Piecewise-Linear Solution Path of Kernel Quantile Regression Ichiro Takeuchi, Kaname Nomura, and Takafumi Kanamori Arbitrary Norm Support Vector Machines Kaizu Huang, Danian Zheng, Irwin King, and Michael Lyu Sequential Triangle Strip Generator Based on Hopfield Networks Jiri Simaand Radim Lnenicka ----- ON-LINE - http://neco.mitpress.org/ SUBSCRIPTIONS - 2009 - VOLUME 21 - 12 ISSUES USA/Canada Others Electronic only Student/Retired $60 $123 $54 Individual $110 $173 $99 Institution $849 $912 $756 ----- From terry at salk.edu Tue Jan 13 01:49:17 2009 From: terry at salk.edu (Terry Sejnowski) Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:49:17 -0000 Subject: Connectionists: NEURAL COMPUTATION - March, 2009 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Neural Computation - Contents - Volume 21, Number 3 - March 1, 2009 ARTICLE Sequential Optimal Design of Neurophysiology Experiments Jeremy Lewi, Robert Butera and Liam Paninski NOTE Information in the Nonstationary Case Vincent Vu, Bin Yu, and Robert Kass LETTERS A Canonical Model for Event-Driven Neural Simulators Stefan Mihalas and Ernst Niebur Complete Stability in Multistable Delayed Neural Networks Chang-Yuan Cheng and Chih-Wen Shih An Oscillatory Hebbian Network Model of Short-Term Memory Ransom Winder, James Reggia, Scott Weems, and Michael Bunting Computational Predictions on the Receptive Fields and Organization of V2 for Shape Processing Yiu Fai Sit and Risto Miikkulainen The Variational Gaussian Approximation Revisited Cedric Archambeau and Manfred Opper Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with the Itakura-Saito Divergence. With Application to Music Analysis. Cedric Fevotte, Nancy Bertin, and Jean-Louis Durrieu Parallel Hopfield Networks Robert Wilson Maximum Memory Capacity on Neural Networks with Short-Term Depression and Facilitation Jorge Mejias and Joaquin Torres Adaptive Improved Natural Gradient Algorithm for Blind Source Separation Jianqiang Liu, Weiwei Zhang and Dazheng Feng A Bi-prototype Theory of Facial Attractiveness Fu Chang and Chien-Hsing Chou ----- ON-LINE - http://neco.mitpress.org/ SUBSCRIPTIONS - 2009 - VOLUME 21 - 12 ISSUES USA/Canada Others Electronic only Student/Retired $60 $123 $54 Individual $110 $173 $99 Institution $849 $912 $756 MIT Press Journals, 238 Main Street, Suite 500, Cambridge, MA 02142-9902. Tel: (617) 253-2889 FAX: (617) 577-1545 journals-orders at mit.edu http://mitpressjournals.org/neuralcomp ----- From willshaw at inf.ed.ac.uk Mon Jan 12 14:07:04 2009 From: willshaw at inf.ed.ac.uk (David Willshaw) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:07:04 -0000 Subject: Connectionists: Chair in Computational Neuroscience, Edinburgh Message-ID: <1231785171.27827.192.camel@porthemmet.inf.ed.ac.uk> An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available Url: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20090112/9d2a3b89/attachment.ksh From gaute.einevoll at umb.no Mon Jan 26 08:10:31 2009 From: gaute.einevoll at umb.no (Gaute Einevoll) Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:10:31 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: special issue on LFP modeling in J Comp Neurosci Message-ID: <9E92E19F09561E489F365365882C2C67013F85AD2761@exch01.ans.umb.no> Special issue on "Modeling Extracellular Potentials", edited by Gaute Einevoll, Daniel Wojcik and Alain Destexhe. The goal of this special issue in Journal of Computational neuroscience is to gather work on modeling and theoretical analysis of the origin and interpretation of extracellular potentials such as local field potentials generated by neural activity. Papers that include experimental work are especially encouraged, although purely theoretical studies are also acceptable. The papers submitted to the special issue should be of moderate size (no more than 6 figures). The subject of the papers must fit the Aims & Scope of the journal, and must in particular not be purely methodological but also illustrate results that advance our understanding of brain function in a broad sense. The papers must contain new material, but we encourage the authors to also include review material to help the reader fully understand the context of the study. Anyone is welcome to submit a contribution as long as it fits the above criteria. The papers will be reviewed by the editorial board of the journal, with the same criteria as for normal articles submitted to the journal. Submission deadline: July 1st, 2009. Submission information: all papers must be submitted electronically as explained in the instructions for authors at the web site of the journal http://www.springer.com/10827 When submitting the paper, choose the option "special issue on modeling extracellular potentials". All the formatting instructions are as for regular papers in the journal (except for the moderate size as explained above). The deadline to be considered to the special issue is on July 1st, 2009. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Gaute T. Einevoll, Physics Department of Mathematical Sciences and Technology, Norwegian University of Life Sciences P.O.Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway; ph: +47-64965433, fax: +47-64965401, mobile: +47-95124536 Home: Plataaveien 9, 1369 Stabekk (+47-67580805) e-mail: Gaute.Einevoll at umb.no URL: http://arken.umb.no/~gautei/ From juergen at idsia.ch Wed Jan 21 08:42:16 2009 From: juergen at idsia.ch (Juergen Schmidhuber) Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:42:16 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: 10 jobs at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA: 5 Postdocs & 5 PhD students in Machine Learning & Cognitive Robotics Message-ID: <549187EF-E1D2-4EA2-921C-737821AA231D@idsia.ch> The Robot Learning Group at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA is currently expanding. We are seeking 5 outstanding postdocs and 5 excellent PhD students with experience / interest in topics such as adaptive robotics http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/learningrobots.html , curiosity- driven learning & intrinsic motivations based on the theory of surprise and interestingness http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ interest.html , computer vision, reinforcement learning & policy gradients for partially observable environments http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/rl.html , artificial evolution http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/evolution.html , recurrent neural networks (RNN) http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ rnn.html , RNN evolution http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ rnnevolution.html , hierarchical reinforcement learning http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/subgoals.html , statistical / Bayesian approaches to machine learning, statistical robotics http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/statisticalrobotics.html , unsupervised learning http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ica.html , general artificial intelligence http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ai.html , universal learning machines http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html & http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html . Goal: to improve the state of the art in adaptive robotics and machine learning in general, in both theory and practice. Funding is provided by several new EU projects, one on developmental robotics with adaptive iCub humanoids exploring the world like little infants, one on learning to control artificial hands with antagonistic & stiff muscles, and one on self-reference and "humanobs." But all postdocs and students will interact with each other and resident IDSIAni - we are one big family! Our international project partners include leading neuroscientists, machine learners, psychologists, roboticists, and other experts from Germany, the UK, Italy, Scandinavia, the US, and other countries. Salary: commensurate with experience. Postdocs ~ SFR 72,000 / year (~ US$ 67,000 / ? 48,000 / ? 46,000 as of 1/1/09). PhD fellowships: ~ SFR 38,000 / year (~ $ 35,000 as of 1/1/09). Low taxes! There is travel funding in case of papers accepted at important conferences. Interviews: most will take place at IDSIA in Switzerland, but we will also arrange meetings in the period 5-17 March 2009 in the area Washington / New York / Boston, where JS will give the AGI-09 keynote and talks at various US East Coast labs. Instructions and background: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/eu2009.html Juergen Schmidhuber --- IDSIA was the smallest of the world's top ten AI labs listed in the 1997 "X-Lab Survey" by Business Week magazine, and ranked in fourth place in the category "Computer Science - Biologically Inspired". IDSIA's most important work was done after 1997 though. It is small but visible, competitive, and influential. Its highly cited Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms broke numerous benchmark records and are now widely used in industry for routing, logistics etc (today entire conferences specialize on Artificial Ants). IDSIA is also the origin of the first mathematical theory of optimal Universal Artificial Intelligence and self-referential Universal Problem Solvers (previous work on general AI was dominated by heuristics). IDSIA's artificial Recurrent Neural Networks learn to solve numerous previous unlearnable sequence processing tasks through gradient descent, artificial evolution and other methods. Research topics also include complexity and generalization issues, unsupervised learning and information theory, forecasting, learning robots. IDSIA's results were reviewed not only in science journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, but also in numerous popular press articles in TIME, the NY Times, der SPIEGEL, etc. Many TV shows on Tech & Science helped to popularize IDSIA's achievements. Switzerland is a good place for scientists. It is the origin of special relativity (1905) and the World Wide Web (1990), is associated with 105 Nobel laureates, and boasts far more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation. It also has the world's highest number of publications per capita, the highest number of patents per capita, the highest citation impact factor, the most cited single-author paper, etc, etc. Switzerland also got the highest ranking in the list of happiest countries. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20090121/d325580f/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2415 bytes Desc: not available Url : https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20090121/d325580f/smime.bin