From yuille at stat.ucla.edu Sun May 1 22:09:15 2011 From: yuille at stat.ucla.edu (Alan Yuille) Date: Sun, 1 May 2011 19:09:15 -0700 Subject: Connectionists: Frontiers of Computer Vision Workshop: 21-24 August MIT. Call for White Papers. Deadline 12/May Message-ID: <007801cc086d$f01be840$d053b8c0$@ucla.edu> We announce the NSF workshop on Frontiers of Computer Vision to be held at MIT on 21-24 August 2011. Details of the workshop can be found on the webpage: http://www.frontiersincomputervision.com/ There is space for additional participants based on the submission of a white paper (deadline 12/May). For details please click on Participate. Best, Alan Yuille (UCLA) and Aude Oliva (MIT) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110501/b9f5553e/attachment.html From jun-y at oist.jp Mon May 2 00:24:26 2011 From: jun-y at oist.jp (Junichiro Yoshimoto) Date: Mon, 02 May 2011 13:24:26 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: Call for Papers: JNNS2011 Message-ID: <4DBE31FA.8080800@oist.jp> ------------------------------------------------------------------ *** Our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CFP *** ------------------------------------------------------------------ Annual Conference of the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS2011) December 15-17, 2011 Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Onna-Village, Okinawa, Japan Web Site: http://www.jnns.org/conference/2011 The 21st Annual Conference of the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS2011) will be held from December 15th to 17th at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), an international graduate university newly built on a semitropical island 1,600km southwest of Tokyo. JNNS2011 aims to provide a forum for scientists, engineers, educators, and students to discuss the latest progress and future challenges in the field of neural information processing. All presentations will be English to promote international participation. Travel support will be provided for selected student presenters. Keynote Speakers: Dr. Richard Sutton (University of Alberta) Dr. Peter Dayan (University College London) Call for Papers: JNNS2011 invites the submission of papers on substantial and original research in all aspects of neural information processing. We welcome contributions from diverse fields including neurobiology, psychology, mathematical modeling and analysis, machine learning, and information technology. The presenting author should be a member of JNNS or supporting societies except presenters from overseas. An author can present only one paper but can be a non-presenting co-author of other papers. Papers should be written in English and is limited to two pages in A4 format using the LaTeX or Word template provided on the web site. Papers should be submitted through the on-line submission system to be open on July 1, 2011. The deadline is noon UTC (9 pm JST) of August 31, 2011. All submitted papers will go through reviewing for acceptance and selection for oral presentation. The result will be notified by October 20. The presenting authors of accepted papers are asked to register for attendance through the web site by October 31, 2011; otherwise, the acceptance will be cancelled. Presentation Format: All general presentations will be given in poster sessions. Selected papers will be presented in single-track oral sessions as well. Important Dates: Paper submission deadline: August 31, 2011. Notification of acceptance: October 20, 2011. Early registration deadline: October 31, 2011. Sponsor: Japanese Neural Network Society Co-Sponsor: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Supported by The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, The Japan Neuroscience Society, and The Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (as of April 28th, 2011). Organizers: Executive Chair: Kenji Doya (OIST) Program Chair: Junichiro Yoshimoto (OIST) Secretariat: Neural Computation Unit Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology 1919-1 Tancha, Onna, Kunigami, Okinawa 904-0412, Japan E-mail: jnns2011(at)oist.jp From steve at cns.bu.edu Tue May 3 23:23:13 2011 From: steve at cns.bu.edu (Stephen Grossberg) Date: Tue, 3 May 2011 23:23:13 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: three articles on invariant object learning and recognition Message-ID: <3C93573C-C8EB-4069-AC26-9E7D16333AEF@cns.bu.edu> The following articles are now available at http://cns.bu.edu/~steve: On the road to invariant recognition: How cortical area V2 transforms absolute into relative disparity during 3D vision Grossberg, S., Srinivasan, K., and Yazdanbakhsh, A. Abstract: Invariant recognition of objects depends on a hierarchy of cortical stages that build invariance gradually. Binocular disparity computations are a key part of this transformation. Cortical area V1 computes absolute disparity, which is the horizontal difference in retinal location of an image in left and right foveas. Many cells in cortical area V2 compute relative disparity, which is the difference in absolute disparity of two visible features. Relative, but not absolute, disparity is invariant under both a disparity change across a scene and vergence eye movements. A neural network model is introduced which predicts that shunting lateral inhibition of disparity-sensitive layer 4 cells in V2 causes a peak shift in cell responses that transforms absolute disparity from V1 into relative disparity in V2. This inhibitory circuit has previously been implicated in contrast gain control, divisive normalization, selection of perceptual groupings, and attentional focusing. The model hereby links relative disparity to other visual functions and thereby suggests new ways to test its mechanistic basis. Other brain circuits are reviewed wherein lateral inhibition causes a peak shift that influences behavioral responses. ********************************************************************************************************************************************** On the road to invariant recognition: Explaining tradeoff and morph properties of cells in inferotemporal cortex using multiple-scale task-sensitive attentive learning Grossberg, S., Markowitz, J., and Cao, Y. Abstract: Visual object recognition is an essential accomplishment of advanced brains. Object recognition needs to be tolerant, or invariant, with respect to changes in object position, size, and view. In monkeys and humans, a key area for recognition is the anterior inferotemporal cortex (ITa). Recent neurophysiological data show that ITa cells with high object selectivity often have low position tolerance. We propose a neural model whose cells learn to simulate this tradeoff, as well as ITa responses to image morphs, while explaining how invariant recognition properties may arise in stages due to processes across multiple cortical areas. These processes include the cortical magnification factor, multiple receptive field sizes, and top-down attentive matching and learning properties that may be tuned by task requirements to attend to either concrete or abstract visual features with different levels of vigilance. The model predicts that data from the tradeoff and image morph tasks emerge from different levels of vigilance in the animals performing them. This result illustrates how different vigilance requirements of a task may change the course of category learning, notably the critical features that are attended and incorporated into learned category prototypes. The model outlines a path for developing an animal model of how defective vigilance control can lead to symptoms of various mental disorders, such as autism and amnesia. ********************************************************************************************************************************************** How does the brain rapidly learn and reorganize view- and positionally-invariate object representations in inferior temporal cortex? Cao, Y., Grossberg, S., and Markowitz, J. Abstract: All primates depend for their survival on being able to rapidly learn about and recognize objects. Objects may be visually detected at multiple positions, sizes, and viewpoints. How does the brain rapidly learn and recognize objects while scanning a scene with eye movements, without causing a combinatorial explosion in the number of cells that are needed? How does the brain avoid the problem of erroneously classifying parts of different objects together at the same or different positions in a visual scene? In monkeys and humans, a key area for such invariant object category learning and recognition is the inferotemporal cortex (IT). A neural model is proposed to explain how spatial and object attention coordinate the ability of IT to learn invariant category representations of objects that are seen at multiple positions, sizes, and viewpoints. The model clarifies how interactions within a hierarchy of processing stages in the visual brain accomplish this. These stages include retina, lateral geniculate nucleus, and cortical areas V1, V2, V4, and IT in the brain's What cortical stream, as they interact with spatial attention processes within the parietal cortex of the Where cortical stream. The model builds upon the ARTSCAN model, which proposed how view-invariant object representations are generated. The pARTSCAN model proposes how the following additional processes in the What cortical processing stream also enable positionally-invariant object representations to be learned: IT cells with persistent activity, and a combination of normalizing object category competition and a view-to-object learning law which together ensure that unambiguous views have a larger effect on object recognition than ambiguous views. The model explains how such invariant learning can be fooled when monkeys, or other primates, are presented with an object that is swapped with another object during eye movements to foveate the original object. The swapping procedure is predicted to prevent the reset of spatial attention, which would otherwise keep the representations of multiple objects from being combined by learning. Li & DiCarlo (2008) have presented neurophysiological data from monkeys showing how unsupervised natural experience in a target swapping experiment can rapidly alter object representations in IT. The model quantitatively simulates the swapping data by showing how the swapping procedure fools the spatial attention mechanism. More generally, the model provides a unifying framework, and testable predictions in both monkeys and humans, for understanding object learning data using neurophysiological methods in monkeys and spatial attention, episodic learning, and memory retrieval data using functional imaging methods in humans. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110503/93520574/attachment.html From choe at cs.tamu.edu Wed May 4 01:17:12 2011 From: choe at cs.tamu.edu (Yoonsuck Choe) Date: Wed, 4 May 2011 00:17:12 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Connectionists: IJCNN 2011, San Jose, CA, 7/31-8/5: Call for Participation Message-ID: INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON NEURAL NETWORKS (IJCNN 2011) San Jose, California July 31 - August 5, 2011 http://www.ijcnn2011.org REGISTRATIONS OPEN!!!! Registration is open for the 2011 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, to be held at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California, July 31 – August 5, 2011. The conference is sponsored jointly by the International Neural Network Society and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. For imformation on the conference, see http://www.ijcnn2011.org Early registration rates apply until June 30, 2011., and will increase after that, so please register soon. To register, please go to: http://www.ijcnn2011.org/registration.php This link also provides information on how to request letters of invitation for visa applications. For information on student travel awards, please go to: http://www.ijcnn2011.org/student.php More conference support for students will be announced soon. The range of topics covered at the conference includes, but is not limited to: * Neural network theory & models. * Collective intelligence. * Computational neuroscience. * Pattern recognition. * Cognitive models. * Machine vision. * Brain-machine interfaces. * Hybrid systems. * Embodied robotics. * Self-aware systems. * Evolutionary neural systems. * Data mining. * Neurodynamics. * Sensor networks. * Neuroinformatics. * Agent-based systems. * Neuroengineering. * Computational biology. * Neural hardware. * Bioinformatics * Neural network applications. * Artificial life. In addition to oral and poster presentations, special sessions, panels, tutorials and workshops, IJCNN 2011 will feature the following special events: Plenary talks by: Michael Arbib University of Southern California Leon Glass McGill University Dharmendra Modha IBM Almaden Research Center Andrew Ng Stanford University Stefan Schaal University of Southern California Juergen Schmidhuber IDSIA, Switzerland David Rumelhart Memorial Session On Wednesday, August 3, IJCNN 2011 will feature a special plenary session honoring the life and work of the late David Rumelhart. Speaker: Michael I. Jordan (University of California, Berkeley) Featured Plenary Session: The Emergence of Mind On Thursday, August 4, IJCNN 2011 will feature a special plenary session focusing on how higher mental functions emerge from the neural substrate of the brain. Speakers: Stephen Grossberg (Boston University) Walter J. Freeman (University of California, Berkeley) Bernard J. Baars (The Neuroscience Institute) Details at: http://www.ijcnn2011.org/plenaries.php NSF-Sponsored Special Symposium: From Brains to Machines On Tuesday, August 2, IJCNN 2011 will feature a special day-long symposium sponsored by the National Science Foundation, with speakers on topics from cognitive neuroscience, brain-machine interfaces, cognitive computing and neuromorphic hardware. Speakers include: Michael Arbib (University of Southern California) Ted Berger (University of Southern California) Jose Carmena (Uiversity of California, Berkeley) Adam Gazzaley (Uiversity of California, San Francisco), Dileep George (Vicarious Systems) Cheryl Grady (Rotman Research Institute) Eric Leuthardt (Washington University, St. Louis) Vinod Menon (Stanford University) Dharmendra Modha (IBM Almaden) Jennie Si (Arizona State University) Details at: http://www.ijcnn2011.org/nsfsymposium.php For information on special sessions, tutorials, workshops, panels and competitions, please use the appropriate link at http://www.ijcnn2011.org We look forward to seeing you in San Jose for an exciting conference! General Chair: Ali A. Minai (University of Cincinnati) Program Chair: Hava Siegelmann (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Technical Co-Chairs: Michael Georgiopoulos (University of Central Florida) Cesare Alippi (Politecnico di Milano) From ted.carnevale at yale.edu Wed May 4 14:11:37 2011 From: ted.carnevale at yale.edu (Ted Carnevale) Date: Wed, 04 May 2011 14:11:37 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: NEURON 2011 Summer Course Message-ID: <4DC196D9.2070709@yale.edu> Seats remain available for the NEURON 2010 Summer Course, but the registration deadline is Wednesday, June 1, 2011, just 4 weeks from today, so you should act soon if you are interested. In addition to providing a solid introduction to how to use NEURON for modeling individual neurons and networks, this year's course will include new information about how to use NEURON with Python, and how to speed up simulations by parallel computation on hardware ranging from PCs and Macs to workstation clusters and parallel supercomputers. Registration is limited to 20. For more information, see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2011/nscsd2011.html or contact Ted Carnevale Neurobiology Dept. Yale University School of Medicine PO Box 208001 New Haven, CT 06520-8001 phone 203-494-7381 email ted.carnevale at yale.edu Supported in part by: National Institutes of Health Institute for Neural Computation http://inc.ucsd.edu/ Contractual terms require inclusion of the following statement: This course is not sponsored by the University of California. From cardoso at bcos.uni-freiburg.de Mon May 9 03:17:55 2011 From: cardoso at bcos.uni-freiburg.de (Simone Cardoso de Oliveira) Date: Mon, 09 May 2011 09:17:55 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Reminder: Brains for Brains Young Researchers' Computational Neuroscience Awards 2011 Message-ID: <4DC79523.9030204@bcos.uni-freiburg.de> Dear colleagues, for the second time, the Bernstein Computational Neuroscience Association is announcing the "Brains for Brains Young Researchers' Computational Neuroscience Award". The call is open for researchers of any nationality who have contributed to a peer reviewed publication or peer reviewed conference abstract that resulted from research performed before the initiation of doctoral studies, is written in English and was accepted or published in 2010 or 2011. The award comprises 500 ? prize money, plus a travel grant of up to 1.500 ? to cover a one-week trip to Germany, including a talk at the Award Ceremony during the Bernstein Conference 2011 in Freiburg, and an individually planned visit to up to two German research institutions in Computational Neuroscience. Deadline for application is May 31, 2011. Detailed information about the application procedure can be found under: www.nncn.de/verein-en/brains4brains2011 Please encourage suitable candidates to apply. Best regards, Simone Cardoso -- Dr. Simone Cardoso de Oliveira Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience Head of the Bernstein Coordination Site (BCOS) Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg Hansastr. 9A 79104 Freiburg, Germany phone: +49-761-203-9583 fax: +49-761-203-9585 cardoso at bcos.uni-freiburg.de www.nncn.de From icais11 at cuas.at Fri May 6 05:53:13 2011 From: icais11 at cuas.at (icais11) Date: Fri, 6 May 2011 11:53:13 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: 2nd CFP: The 2011 International Conference on Adaptive and Intelligent Systems (ICAIS'11), Austria, September 06-08, 2011 Message-ID: <29E93A60E97FC647BD76AAA56A3D935E0B3710EF25@exchange05.technikum.local> [Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CFP] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * * * 2nd CALL FOR PAPERS * * * The 2011 International Conference on Adaptive & Intelligent Systems - ICAIS'11 September 06th - 08th, 2011 Klagenfurt, Austria http://icais.uni-klu.ac.at Sponsored by - IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) - The International Neural Network Society - The Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * * * AIMS OF THE CONFERENCE * * * The ICAIS'11 conference aims at bringing together international researchers, developers and practitioners from different horizons to discuss the latest advances in system learning and adaptation. ICAIS'11 will serve as a space to present the current state of the art but also future research avenues of this thematic. Topics of the conference cover three aspects: Algorithms & theories of adaptation and learning, Adaptation issues in Software & System Engineering, Real-world Applications. ICAIS'11 will feature contributed papers as well as world-renowned guest speakers (see webpage), interactive breakout sessions, and instructional workshops. Conference Proceedings will be published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Series. * * * IMPORTANT DATES * * * - Full paper submission: June 10, 2011 - Acceptance notification: July 08, 2011 - Final camera ready: July 18, 2011 * * * POST-CONFERENCE PUBLICATION * * * A selected number of accepted and personally presented papers will be considered for possible inclusion in one of the following special issues of international journals: - Special Issue of Evolving Systems (Springer) on Clustering and Classification in Dynamic Environments - Special Issue of Neurocomputing (Elsevier) on Neurocompting for Dynamically Changing Systems * * * MAIN TOPICS (but not limited to) * * * - Track 1: Self-X Systems o Self-adaptation o Self-organization and behavior emergence o Self-managing o Self-healing o Self-monitoring o Multi-agent systems o Self-X software agents o Self-X robots o Self-organizing sensor networks o Evolving systems - Track 2: Incremental Learning o Online incremental learning o Self-growing neural networks o Adaptive and life-long learning o Plasticity and stability o Forgetting o Unlearning o Novelty detection o Perception and evolution o Drift handling o Adaptation in changing environments - Track 3: Online Processing o Adaptive rule-based systems o Adaptive identification systems o Adaptive decision systems o Adaptive preference learning o Time series prediction o Online and single-pass data mining o Online classification o Online clustering o Online regression o Online feature selection and reduction o Online information routing - Track 4: Dynamic and Evolving Models in Computational Intelligence o (Dynamic) Neural networks architectures o (Dynamic) Evolutionary computation o (Dynamic) Swarm intelligence o (Dynamic) Immune and bacterial systems o Uncertainty and fuzziness modeling for adaptation o Approximate reasoning and adaptation o Chaotic systems - Track 5: Software & System Engineering o Autonomic computing o Organic computing o Evolution o Adaptive software architecture o Software change o Software agents o Engineering of complex systems o Adaptive software engineering processes o Component-based development - Track 6: Applications - Adaptivity and Learning o Smart systems o Ambient / ubiquitous environments o Distributed intelligence o Robotics o Industrial applications o Internet applications o Business applications o Supply chain management o etc. * * * SUBMISSION * * * Papers must be in PDF, not exceeding 10 pages and conforming to Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes guidelines. Author instructions and style files can be downloaded at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Papers must be submitted through the submission system ( http://icais.uni-klu.ac.at/openconf/openconf.php ). Short papers describing novel research visions, work-in-progress or less mature results are also welcome. All submission will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 qualified reviewers. Selection criteria will include: relevance, significance, impact, originality, technical soundness, and quality of presentation. Preference will be given to submissions that take strong or challenging positions on important emergent topics. At least one author have to attend the conference to present the paper. The conference proceedings which will be published as a hardcopy by Springer in LNAI, will be available at the conference. * * * ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE * * * General Chair: - Abdelhamid Bouchachia, University of Klagenfurt, Austria International Advisory Committee: - Nikola Kasabov, Auckland University, New Zealand - Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi, University of Milano, Italy - Djamel Ziou, University of Sherbrooke, Canada - Plamen Angelov, University of Lancaster, UK - Hani Hagras, University of Essex, UK - Witold Pedrycz, University of Edmonton, Canada - Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland Organization Committee: - Roland Mittermeir, University of Klagenfurt, Austria - Annette Lippitsch, University of Klagenfurt, Austria - Markus Kuenstner, University of Klagenfurt, Austria - Andreas Bollin, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Publicity Chair: - Markus Prossegger, Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Austria -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110506/81e85ceb/attachment-0001.html From jaakko.peltonen at tkk.fi Fri May 6 12:51:37 2011 From: jaakko.peltonen at tkk.fi (jaakko.peltonen@tkk.fi) Date: Fri, 6 May 2011 19:51:37 +0300 (EEST) Subject: Connectionists: Call for participation: WSOM 2011, 8th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps Message-ID: =================================================================== Call for Participation for WSOM 2011, 8th WORKSHOP ON SELF-ORGANIZING MAPS 13 - 15 June 2011, Espoo, Finland Aalto University School of Science and Dipoli Conference Center Website: http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 =================================================================== GENERAL INFORMATION WSOM 2011 will bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of self-organizing systems, with a particular emphasis on the self-organizing maps. It will highlight key advances in these and closely related fields. WSOM 2011 is the eighth conference in a series of bi-annual international conferences started with WSOM'97 in Helsinki. The event will be co-located with the ICANN 2011 conference that will be organized from 14th to 17th of June, 2011. Conference programmes, registrations and fees will be coordinated. VENUE WSOM 2011 will take place at the Aalto University School of Science (former Helsinki University of Technology) and Dipoli Conference Center. They are located in Espoo, in the close vicinity of the Helsinki capital area. The area is one of the ICT research and development hot spots in Europe as well as known for its beautiful and easily accessible nature. The time of the year is particularly suitable for visiting Finland. PLENARY SPEAKERS Barbara Hammer, Bielefeld University: Topographic Mapping of Dissimilarity Data Teuvo Kohonen, Academy of Finland: Contextually Self-Organized Maps of Chinese Words PROGRAM WSOM 2011 features 36 oral or poster presentations. The full program is available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 . ORGANIZERS * Honorary chair Teuvo KOHONEN Academy of Finland * General chair Timo HONKELA Aalto University School of Science * Program chair Jorma LAAKSONEN Aalto University School of Science * Local chair Olli SIMULA Aalto University School of Science * Publicity chair Jaakko PELTONEN Aalto University School of Science STEERING COMMITTEE * Teuvo KOHONEN * Marie COTTRELL * Pablo ESTEVEZ * Timo HONKELA * Erkki OJA * Jose PRINCIPE * Helge RITTER * Takeshi YAMAKAWA * Hujun YIN PROGRAM COMMITTEE * Guilherme BARRETO * Yoonsuck CHOE * Jean-Claude FORT * Tetsuo FURUKAWA * Colin FYFE * Barbara HAMMER * Samuel KASKI * Krista LAGUS * Amaury LENDASSE * Ping LI * Thomas MARTINETZ * Risto MIIKKULAINEN * Klaus OBERMAYER * Jaakko PELTONEN * Marina RESTA * Udo SEIFFERT * Olli SIMULA * Kadim TASDEMIR * Heizo TOKUTAKA * Carme TORRAS * Alfred ULTSCH * Marc VAN HULLE * Michel VERLEYSEN * Thomas VILLMANN * Lei XU REGISTRATION Registration for WSOM 2011 is now open! The on-line registration is available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 . In addition to WSOM registration, joint registration to both WSOM 2011 and ICANN 2011 is available. See http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 for the full range of registration options and prices. ACCOMMODATION The closest hotel is Radisson Blu Hotel Espoo, located next to the workshop venue. See http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 for accommodation details. ====== See http://www.cis.hut.fi/wsom2011 for more details! ======= From kirsch at bcf.uni-freiburg.de Fri May 6 16:16:28 2011 From: kirsch at bcf.uni-freiburg.de (Janina Kirsch) Date: Fri, 6 May 2011 22:16:28 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: NeuroVision Film Contest Message-ID: <015101cc0c2a$7c483b10$74d8b130$@uni-freiburg.de> ************ "Can you show us the invisible?" On the surface, the brain seems to be nothing but a mass of grey matter, and groundbreaking revelations about it often just take the form of black ink on white paper. Do you have the imagination and vision to bring neuroscience to life in a film? If your answer is ?yes?, then enter the NeuroVision Film Contest, and win an award for the best visualisation of neuroscience! Conditions: * Anyone who is not a media professional can submit a film. We especially invite students, researchers, and communicators from the field of neuroscience as well as film school students to participate. * All submissions must deal with a topic of neuroscience and may not exceed 5 minutes in length. * The spoken language must be English, or English subtitles must be provided. * You must own the rights to all parts of the film, or they must be licensed under a Creative Commons agreement. * Submissions must reach us before September 2, 2011, and must include the film on video DVD and a short CV of the film?s creators. * Both a jury and the audience will award a prize. The creators of the winning films will receive 500 ?. Please send your film to: Gunnar Grah, Bernstein Center Freiburg Hansastr. 9A, 79104 Freiburg, Germany The NeuroVision Film Contest will take place during the Bernstein Conference 2011, October 4-6, in Freiburg. For informtation and updates, please go to: http://www.bccn-2011.uni-freiburg.de/neurovision ************ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Neurovision flyer small.pdf Type: application/binary Size: 920510 bytes Desc: not available Url : https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110506/5d27d82b/Neurovisionflyersmall-0001.bin From jaakko.peltonen at tkk.fi Thu May 12 14:06:23 2011 From: jaakko.peltonen at tkk.fi (jaakko.peltonen@tkk.fi) Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 21:06:23 +0300 (EEST) Subject: Connectionists: Call for participation: ICANN 2011 - Machine learning re-inspired by brain and cognition Message-ID: =================================================================== Call for Participation: ICANN 2011 The Twentieth Anniversary ICANN is back at its roots: Machine learning re-inspired by brain and cognition International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks 14 - 17 June 2011, Espoo, Finland http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 Registration is now open. =================================================================== The International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN) is the annual flagship conference of the European Neural Network Society (ENNS). In 2011, ICANN returns to its roots after 20 years. The very first ICANN in 1991 was organized at Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo, Finland. We invite all neural network researchers worldwide to join us in celebrating this 20th anniversary of ICANN and to see the latest advancements in our fast progressing field. ICANN 2011 presents research on two major themes, Brain-inspired computing and Machine learning research; Keynote speakers and competitions highlight cross-disciplinary interactions and applications. VENUE ICANN 2011 will be held in the Dipoli Congress Center located on the beautiful campus of Aalto University (former Helsinki University of Technology), in Espoo (8km west from the city centre of Helsinki). The time of the year is particularly suitable for visiting Finland. CONFERENCE TOPICS ICANN 2011 presents research on two major themes, Brain-inspired computing and Machine learning research, with strong cross- disciplinary interactions and applications. A non-exhaustive list of topics: - Brain inspired computing: Connectionist cognitive science, Neural and hybrid architectures and learning algorithms, Neural control and planning, Reinforcement learning, Computational neuroscience, Neural dynamics and complex systems, Self-organization, Neuro- cognitive architectures, Recurrent networks - Machine learning research: Graphical models, Bayesian networks, Kernel methods, Generative models, Information theoretic learning, Nonlinear projection, Relational learning, Online learning, Dynamical models, Reinforcement learning - Applications and cross-disciplinary connections: Data analysis, Pattern recognition, Signal and time series processing, Blind source separation, Hardware implementations and embedded systems, Intelligent multimedia, Knowledge management, Multimodal interfaces, Vision and image processing, Biomedical image analysis, Speech and language processing, Robotics applications, Intelligent control, Neuroinformatics, Bioinformatics, Biomedical applications, Brain-computer interfaces, Critical infrastructure systems, Complex networks PLENARY SPEAKERS Tom Griffiths, University of California Berkeley (http://cocosci.berkeley.edu/tom/) Riitta Hari, Aalto University (http://ltl.tkk.fi/wiki/Riitta_Hari) Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/) Aapo Hyvarinen, University of Helsinki (http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/) John Shawe-Taylor, University College London (http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.shawe-taylor/) Josh Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html) All ICANN participants are also welcome to follow the WSOM 2011 plenary session by Teuvo Kohonen on "Contextually Self-Organized Maps of Chinese Words". ORGANIZATION General chair: Erkki Oja Program chairs: Wlodzislaw Duch, Mark Girolami, Timo Honkela, Samuel Kaski Workshop chair: Alexander Ilin Local chair: Amaury Lendasse Publicity chair: Jaakko Peltonen Organizing committee members: Francesco Corona, Krista Lagus, Yoan Miche, Ilari Nieminen, Mari-Sanna Paukkeri, Tapani Raiko, Ricardo Vigario AREA CHAIRS Peter Auer, Austria Christian Bauckhage, Germany Wray Buntine, Australia Vince Calhoun, USA Antonius Coolen, UK Barbara Hammer, Germany Giulio Jacucci, Finland Kristian Kersting, Germany Mikko Kurimo, Finland Neil Lawrence, UK Te-Won Lee, USA Hiroshi Mamitsuka, Japan Fernando Morgado Dias, Portugal Klaus-Robert Muller, Germany Klaus Obermayer, Germany Cheng Soon Ong, Switzerland Jan Peters, Germany Marios Polycarpou, Cyprus Jose Principe, USA Volker Roth, Switzerland Craig Saunders, UK Alan Stocker, USA Masashi Sugiyama, Japan Ron Sun, USA Peter Tino, UK Alfred Ultsch, Germany Koen Van Leemput, USA Michel Verleysen, Belgium Jean-Philippe Vert, France Ole Winther, Denmark Chang D. Yoo, South Korea PROGRAMME ICANN 2011 features six plenary sessions, a panel discussion on central issues related to neural networks and machine learning research, five workshops, fourteen oral sessions, a poster spotlight session, and a poster session. The full programme of ICANN 2011 is now available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 . WORKSHOPS ICANN 2011 hosts five workshops: - Computational Intelligence for Quality of Life Environmental Information Services - Validation of Computational Models in Social and Economic Sciences - Beyond Correlations: Developments in Supervised Learning Algorithms for Spiking Neural Networks - Challenge Workshop: Mind Reading Competition on MEG Data - META-NET Workshop: Context in Machine Translation Details of the workshops will be available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 . WSOM 2011, the 8th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (13-15 June 2011) will be co-located with ICANN 2011. COMPETITIONS Mind reading competition on MEG data: classify from MEG signals which type of video stimulus the subject is viewing such as football match, movie, natural scenery, etc. META-NET Multimodal Machine Translation Challenge: choose the best translation from translations given by multiple machine translation systems, using additional context information like domain, surrounding text, etc. See http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 for more details. REGISTRATION Registration for ICANN 2011 is now open. The on-line registration is available at http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 . In addition to ICANN registration, joint registration to both ICANN 2011 and WSOM 2011 is available. See http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 for the full range of registration options and prices. ACCOMMODATION A conference price has been arranged at the Sokos Presidentti Hotel, and convenient public transportation to the conference site is available. See http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 for accommodation details. SPONSORS ICANN 2011 is supported by European Neural Network Society (ENNS), Pattern Recognition Society of Finland and Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society. ====== See http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011 for more details. ====== From jamesk at cse.ust.hk Mon May 9 05:27:52 2011 From: jamesk at cse.ust.hk (James Kwok) Date: Mon, 09 May 2011 17:27:52 +0800 Subject: Connectionists: CFP: 18th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP2011) Message-ID: <4DC7B398.1080800@cse.ust.hk> 18th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP2011) November 14-17, 2011 Majesty Plaza Hotel (http://majestyplazashanghai.com/), Shanghai, China Website: http://iconip2011.sjtu.edu.cn/index.html The 2011 International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2011) will be held in Shanghai, China. It is an annual event, organized since 1994 by the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). ICONIP 2011 aims to provide a high-level international forum for scientists, engineers, educators, and students to address new challenges, share solutions, and discuss future research directions in neural information processing and real-world applications. Several post-conference workshops, including the 4th International Cybersecurity and Data Mining workshop (CDM2011) and the 2nd Shanghai Workshop on Brain-Computer Interface and Its Applications, will be held on November 18, 2011 at the Xizi Hotel (http://xizihotel.com) in Hangzhou, China. Shanghai is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. It sits on the Yangtze River Delta on China's eastern coast, and is roughly equidistant from Beijing and Hong Kong. The city is an emerging tourist destination renowned for its historical landmarks such as the Bund and Xintiandi, its modern and ever-expanding Pudong skyline including the Oriental Pearl Tower, and its new reputation as a cosmopolitan center of culture and design. Today, Shanghai is the largest center of commerce and finance in mainland China, and has been described as the "showpiece" of the world's fastest-growing economy. Hangzhou is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern china and is located on the Hangzhou Bay 180 kilometers (110 mi) southwest of Shanghai. It has also been one of the most renowned and prosperous cities of China for much of the last 1,000 years, due in part to its beautiful natural scenery; the city's West Lake is its most well-known attraction. Hangzhou is serviced by the Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport. The Shanghai-Hangzhou High-Speed Railway service was opened on October 26, 2010, shortening the duration of the 202 km trip between the two cities to 45 minutes. Accepted papers will be published by Springer in its series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Extended versions of selected good papers will be included, subject to another peer review acceptance/rejection process, in a special Issue of Neurocomputing. Topics for the conference include, but not limited to: - Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Science - Models, Methods and Inference - Vision and Auditory Modeling - Control, Robotics and Hardware - Novel approaches and Applications Authors are invited to submit full-length papers (10 pages maximum) by the submission deadline through the online submission system. The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review or copyright-protected elsewhere and will be presented by an author if accepted. All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the field based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. Important Date: Full Paper Submission Deadline - June 1, 2011 Notification of Acceptance - August 1, 2011 ICONIP Secretariat: iconip2011 at sjtu.edu.cn From morgado at uma.pt Fri May 13 13:23:30 2011 From: morgado at uma.pt (Morgado Dias) Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 18:23:30 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Artificial Neural Networks Survey Message-ID: <4DCD6912.3050707@uma.pt> Please accept my apologies for cross-posting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear connectionists: We invite the connectionists to answer a very short survey about Artificial Neural Networks usage. The survey takes only 2 minutes to fill and your help will be deeply appreciated. The survey can be found at: https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?formkey=dExPZ1QxUnhLZ2tuVEVacURnTG1jcXc6MQ Best regards, Morgado Dias -- Com os melhores cumprimentos, Morgado Dias *Universidade da Madeira * *Morgado Dias * Electr?nica e Telecomunica??es Pr?-Reitor da Universidade da Madeira *morgado at uma.pt* Tel.: 291-705307 *10^th CONTROLO July 2012 Funchal* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110513/f77c5aba/attachment-0001.html From olbrich at mis.mpg.de Tue May 10 04:49:53 2011 From: olbrich at mis.mpg.de (Eckehard Olbrich) Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 10:49:53 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI MiS) Message-ID: <4DC8FC31.70605@mis.mpg.de> A PhD position in the research group of J?rgen Jost is available at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI MiS) (www.mis.mpg.de/jjost/research.html), to work in the collaborative EU project "The Collective Experience of Empathic Data Systems" (CEEDs). The project will develop novel, integrated technologies to support human experience, analysis and understanding of very large datasets. Making use of humans' implicit processing abilities CEEDs will develop innovative tools to exploit theories showing that discovery is the identification of patterns in complex data sets by the implicit information processing capabilities of the human brain. Implicit human responses will be identified by the CEEDs system's analysis of its sensing systems, tuned to users' bio-signals and non-verbal behaviours. By associating these implicit responses with different features of massive datasets, the CEEDs system will guide users' discovery of patterns and meaning within the datasets. The MPI MiS group will be involved on the one hand side in the development and implementation of the methods for data mining and pattern detection and on the other hand in the development of theoretical and computational models of humans information processing. A central topic of the PhD work will be "adaptive sampling". We think that "adaptive sampling" (e.g. maximizing the information gain) could be a paradigm for both the data discovery by the CEEDs agent and for modelling the user. The successful candidate will join a highly interdisciplinary group working on different aspects of complex systems, including complex networks and graph theory, dynamical systems theory, information theory, time series analysis and statistics. Applicants must have a diploma or master degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Cognitive Sciences, Neuroscience, Bioinformatics, or in a related field. Expertise in statistics, data mining, or modelling of cognitive systems is highly welcome. The Max Planck Society is committed to employing more handicapped individuals and especially encourages them to apply. The Max Planck Society seeks to increase the number of women in those areas where they are underrepresented and therefore explicitly encourages women to apply. The position is available as of now. Applications will be considered until the position is filled. Please send your application to J?rgen Jost (jost at mis.mpg.de), and Eckehard Olbrich (olbrich at mis.mpg.de). Please include a cover letter with a brief description of your research interests, curriculum vitae (including examination results), and two letters of recommendation by academic teachers, in sealed envelopes or to be sent directly. From steve at cns.bu.edu Sun May 15 05:54:28 2011 From: steve at cns.bu.edu (Stephen Grossberg) Date: Sun, 15 May 2011 05:54:28 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: laminar cortical dynamics of conscious speech perception Message-ID: <37B62783-983E-42F1-BFE0-E20780C6E0C1@cns.bu.edu> The following article can be found at http://cns.bu.edu/~steve . It proposes how the the brain can complete conscious representations of speech in noise using future contextual information and, more generally, how the laminar circuits of neocortex may realize different types of biological intelligence. Previous articles on the web page have proposed how variants of these laminar circuits can achieve 3D vision and figure-ground separation, and cognitive working memory and chunking of sequential lists. The shared design of these circuits begins to show how multiple cortical areas can communicate in a self-consistent way to achieve visual and auditory perception and cognition. Laminar cortical dynamics of conscious speech perception: A neural model of phonemic restoration using subsequent context in noise Grossberg, S. and Kazerounian, S. Abstract: How are laminar circuits of neocortex organized to generate conscious speech and language percepts? How does the brain restore information that is occluded by noise, or absent from an acoustic signal, by integrating contextual information over many milliseconds to disambiguate noise-occluded acoustical signals? How are speech and language heard in the correct temporal order, despite the influence of contexts that may occur many milliseconds before or after each perceived word? A neural model describes key mechanisms in forming conscious speech percepts, and quantitatively simulates a critical example of contextual disambiguation of speech and language; namely, phonemic restoration. Here, a phoneme deleted from a speech stream is perceptually restored when it is replaced by broadband noise, even when the disambiguating context occurs after the phoneme was presented. The model describes how the laminar circuits within a hierarchy of cortical processing stages may interact to generate a conscious speech percept that is embodied by a resonant wave of activation that occurs between acoustic features, acoustic item chunks, and list chunks. Chunk-mediated gating allows speech to be heard in the correct temporal order, even when what is heard depends upon future context. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110515/a429f2fd/attachment.html From zhaoping at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk Sat May 14 10:06:17 2011 From: zhaoping at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk (Dr Zhaoping Li) Date: Sat, 14 May 2011 15:06:17 +0100 (BST) Subject: Connectionists: Deadline June 1st -2nd Call for participation and contribution to 3rd, Beijing International Symposium on Computational Neuroscience, July 13-14th Message-ID: This symposium will be held on July 13-14, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Submission deadline: June 1st, 2011. See http://cns.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/biscon11/ What: An intensive, high quality, two day symposium on computational neuroscience, organized by Tsinghua University Medical School, will feature presentations of theories, models, and theory/model- motivated experiments in neuroscience. Most presentations will be contributed posters, allowing extensive interactions and exchanges between participants. Additionally, there will be two tutorials and a few invited oral presentations (see below). The topics of interests include, but are not limited to, computational theories and models of vision or other sensory processes, motor control, learning, memory, and decision making; physiological and psychological experiments to test or develop computational theories, such as electrophysiology to test theories of visual attention, and human psychophysics to explore models of visual adaptation, inference, and perceptual learning; inter-disciplinary investigations in neural encoding and decoding, learning and plasticity, neural circuits and networks, etc. This symposium aims to encourage interaction between computational and experimental communities, and between the regional and international communities of computational neuroscience, and to foster and encourage interest among students and young researchers in this field. We hope that such interactions and exchanges will lead to collaborations between participants. Invited Tutorial and symposium speakers: Invited Tutorial speakers Jeremy Wolfe ? Visual search, experiments and models Mitsuo Kawato ?- Computational motor control and BMI There will be two hours of lectures on each topic on July 13th. Invited Symposium Speakers include: Robert Desimone (MIT, USA) --- Interaction between frontal and visual cortex in attention Mitsuo Kawato (ATR, Japan) ?- Perceptual learning incepted by decoded fMRI neurofeedback without visual stimulus presentation Guosong Liu (Tsinghua University, China) ? Enhancement of cognition Fred Wolf (Max Planck Institute for dynamics and self-organization, Goettingen, Germany) ? Title to be announced. Some names of the participants and contributors are Fang Fang (Peking University, China), Barbara Gilliam (University of New South Wales, Australia) Bo Hong (Tsinghua University, China), Yi Jiang (Institute of Psyclogy, CAS, China) Zili Liu (UCLA, USA) Zuxiang Liu (Institute of biophysics, academic sinica, China) *Hiro Nakahara (RIKEN, Japan), Ning Qian (Columbia University, US), Sen Song (Tsinghua University, China), Taro Toyoizumi (RIKEN, Japan) *Doris Tsao (Caltech, USA) *Misha Tsodyks (Weismann Institute, Israel) Wei Wang (Institute of Neuroscience, China) Katsumi Watanabe (University of Tokyo, Japan) Si Wu (Institute of Neuroscience, China), Cong Yu (Beijing Normal University, China) Li Zhaoping (University College London, UK/Tsinghua University, China). (*, not confirmed) Symposium committee: Bo Hong, Ning Qian, Sen Song, and Li Zhaoping. For information for the past symposium (2009 and 2010), see http://cns.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/biscon10/ and http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Zhaoping.Li/BeijingMeeting2009.html Call for contributions and participations: Researchers and students are encouraged to contribute and participate in the symposium. Registration is required, early registration is recommended if you want to secure a place. To contribute a poster presentation, please submit an abstract (max 200 words) together with a one to two A4 page summary of the work in a pdf file at the registration website. Submission deadline is June 10th, 2010. The submissions will be reviewed by the symposium committee. Limited travel support funds are available to help some Chinese students and young researchers to participate in the symposium. Preference will be given to those who present their work. Please contact the symposium organization to apply for financial assistance for travel if needed. Registration: Registration is required to participate in the symposium, early registration is recommended if you want to secure a place. The registration is free for students who do not sign up for symposium dinner. For non-students, the registration costs 450 yuan (about 69 US dollars), or 200 yuan for students who like to sign up for symposium dinner. Receipts will be provided for all registration payments (payable ASAP or when you arrive at the symposium) received. Submission: Please go to Registration to submit poster contributions. Each submission requires an abstract (max 200 words) and a summary (1-2 A4 pages in a pdf file) of the work. Submission deadline is June 1st, 2010. The submissions will be reviewed by the symposium committee with decision about one week after the deadline. Enquiries: Please email biscon11 at gmail.com, or, for urgent enquiries to lizhaoping at tsinghua.edu.cn. Sponsorships: Tsinghua University Medical school, Tsinghua University Computational Neuroscience Laboratory, Tsinghua University. From pmt6sbc at maths.leeds.ac.uk Mon May 16 06:48:44 2011 From: pmt6sbc at maths.leeds.ac.uk (S Barry Cooper) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 11:48:44 +0100 (BST) Subject: Connectionists: Final Call for Papers - Developments in Computational Models 2011 Message-ID: ================================================================ Final Call for Papers DCM 2011 7th International Workshop on Developments in Computational Models July 3, 2011 Zurich, Switzerland http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jkrivine/conferences/DCM2011/DCM_2011.html A satellite event of ICALP 2011 - http://icalp11.inf.ethz.ch/ Extended Deadline for submissions: 30 May, 2011 ================================================================ DCM 2011 is the seventh in a series of international workshops focusing on new computational models. It aims to bring together researchers who are currently developing new computational models or new features of a traditional one. The goal of DCM is to foster interaction, to provide a forum for presenting new ideas and work in progress, and to enable newcomers to learn about current activities in this area. DCM 2011 will be a one-day satellite event of ICALP 2011 in Zurich, Switzerland. TOPICS OF INTEREST: ------------------- Topics of interest include all abstract models of computation and their properties, and their applications to the development of programming languages and systems: - quantum computation, including implementations and formal methods in quantum protocols; - connectionist models of computation, neural nets - probabilistic computation and verification in modeling situations; - chemical, biological and bio-inspired computation, including spatial models, self-assembly, growth models; - general concurrent models including the treatment of mobility, trust, and security; - comparisons of different models of computations; - information-theoretic ideas in computing. IMPORTANT DATES: ---------------- Paper Submission: May 30, 2011 Notification: June 15, 2011 Workshop July 03, 2011 SUBMISSIONS: ------------ Please submit a paper via the conference EasyChair submission page: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dcm2011 Submissions should be at most 12 pages, in PDF format. Please use the EPTCS macro package and follow the instructions of EPTCS: http://eptcs.org/ http://style.eptcs.org/ A submission may contain an appendix, but reading the appendix should should not be necessary to assess the merits of a submission. PUBLICATION: ------------ Accepted contributions will appear in EPTCS (Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science). After the workshop, quality permitting full versions of selected papers will be invited for a special issue in an internationally leading journal. INVITED SPEAKER: Matthias Christandl, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland ----------------- PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: -------------------- Erika Andersson, Heriot-Watt University, UK Nachum Dershowitz, Tel Aviv University, Israel Eleni Diamanti, CNRS & Telecom ParisTech, France Lucas Dixon, Google, USA Elham Kashefi, University of Edinburgh, UK (Co-chair) Delia Kesner, CNRS & Universite Paris Diderot, France Helene Kirchner, INRIA, France Heinz Koeppl, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Jean Krivine, CNRS & Universite Paris Diderot, France (Co-chair) Michael Mislove, Tulane University, USA Mio Murao, University of Tokyo, Japan Vincent van Oostrom, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Femke van Raamsdonk, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Co-chair) Paul Ruet, CNRS & Institut de Mathematiques de Luminy, France Aaron Stump, University of Iowa, USA ================================================================ Further information: Elham Kashefi Jean Krivine Femke van Raamsdonk ================================================================ From yoh at psychology.rutgers.edu Mon May 16 12:47:20 2011 From: yoh at psychology.rutgers.edu (Yaroslav Halchenko) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 12:47:20 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: ANN: Python in Neuroscience satellite of EuroSciPy 2011 Message-ID: <20110516164720.GO7791@onerussian.com> On behalf of NeuroDebian/PyMVPA team (which is planning to present there) I would like to communicate the announcement on call for submissions/participation in Python in Neuroscience satellite of EuroSciPy 2011 http://www.euroscipy.org/card/neurosciences_2011 Paris, Ecole Normale Sup?rieure, August 29-30 2011 The ?Python in Neuroscience? workshop aims at gathering researchers who develop software tools in different branches of neuroscience in order to share ideas, concepts, tools and to foster collaborative projects based on Python language. Abstract submission deadline: June 1st, 2011 Main Topics * tools for neural simulation * electrophysiology data analysis * data management and databasing in neuroimaging and neuroscience * stimulus generation * neuroimaging data processing * workflows and pipelines for data processing * massive computation facilities for simulation and data analysis in neuroscience * visualization tools in neuroscience and neuroimaging Call for Contributions We are soliciting contributions that deal with the above topics using Python tools, including research projects and software presentations, with the hope of interesting a broader community, including e.g. neuroscience and neuroimaging. Important dates Abstract submission opens: May 1st, 2011 Abstract submission deadline: June 1st, 2011 Final program: June 30th, 2011 Registration: June 1st, 2011 -- August 15th, 2011 Workshop: August 29-30, 2011 Submission guidelines * We solicit talk proposals in the form of a one-page long abstract. * The only condition for acceptance is that the abstract fits well with the workshop theme. * Oral and poster presentations will be allocated depending on the number of contributions. Chairs * Bertrand Thirion (INRIA Saclay) * Romain Brette (ENS Paris) Program committee * Eilif M?ller, Blue Brain Project, EPFL Laussane * Ga?l Varoquaux, INSERM U992, Saclay * Rapha?l Ritz, INCF, Stockholm, Sweden * Laurent Perrinet, INCM, Marseille * Andrew Davison, UNIC, CNRS, Gif Contact pythonneuro at sciencesconf.org With best regards, -- PyMVPA/NeuroDebian Team: Yaroslav O. Halchenko & Michael Hanke Postdoctoral Fellows, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755 From thomas.j.palmeri at Vanderbilt.Edu Mon May 16 15:05:47 2011 From: thomas.j.palmeri at Vanderbilt.Edu (Thomas Palmeri) Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 14:05:47 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunity at Vanderbilt In-Reply-To: Message-ID: * Please forward to prospective applicants* Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunity in Object Recognition, Categorization, and Perceptual Expertise Psychology Department Vanderbilt University Applications are being considered for a postdoctoral fellowship in my laboratory at Vanderbilt University for research on visual object recognition, categorization, and perceptual expertise. See my Category Laboratory web site for descriptions of some current projects: catlab.psy.vanderbilt.edu/research Applicants would have opportunities for research combining behavioral experiments and computational modeling, with potential opportunities for eye tracking or functional brain imaging. Collaborative opportunities are possible with members of the Perceptual Expertise Network and the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. The position is one year, renewable. Start date is negotiable. Salary will be based on NIH postdoctoral scale. Applicants should send a cover letter, a CV, a research statement, and names of three references to Tom Palmeri (thomas.j.palmeri at vanderbilt.edu). Category Laboratory: catlab.psy.vanderbilt.edu Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt: www.vanderbilt.edu/psychological_sciences Vanderbilt University: www.vanderbilt.edu Perceptual Expertise Network: gauthier.psy.vanderbilt.edu/pen Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center: tdlc.ucsd.edu ---------------------------- Thomas J. Palmeri Department of Psychology 507 Wilson Hall Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37203 tel: 615-343-7900 fax: 615-343-8449 http://catlab.psy.vanderbilt.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110516/b31aad05/attachment.html From janet.hsiao at gmail.com Mon May 16 22:55:43 2011 From: janet.hsiao at gmail.com (Janet Hsiao) Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 10:55:43 +0800 Subject: Connectionists: Postdoctoral Position in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Message-ID: Postdoctoral Position in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Department of Psychology, the University of Hong Kong A postdoctoral position in computational cognitive neuroscience is currently available in the Cognition & Hemispheric Asymmetry lab led by Dr. Janet Hsiao at the University of Hong Kong. The project will use neurocomputational models to investigate the development of perceptual expertise, such as face/object recognition, visual word recognition, second language acquisition, and music learning (for more information please see: http://cha.psy.hku.hk/). The applicant must have: (1) a Ph.D. degree in Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, or related fields; and (2) good programming skills and experience in Matlab, a strong mathematical background, and experience in computational modeling of cognitive processes. Experience in conducting human experiments is desirable. Interested candidates should send a letter of application, a CV including academic qualifications, research experience, publications, and three letters of reference, to: Dr. Janet Hsiao, jhsiao @ hku.hk, with the subject line "Postdoctoral position". For more information please contact Dr. Janet Hsiao. You can talk to Dr. Janet Hsiao at the upcoming Asia Pacific Conference on Vision (http://www.apcv.net/) in Hong Kong (July 15-19) and the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Boston, USA (July 20 ? 23). Review of applications will begin immediately, and continue until the position is filled. The University of Hong Kong is an English speaking university and recently ranked No.1 in Asia and 21st in the world in the 2010-11 Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. It is also ranked 30th in the world for Psychology according to the most recent QS World University Rankings. The University is located at Hong Kong Island, and it fully enjoys the fusion when the east meets the west. More information about the Department of Psychology at HKU is available at: http://www.hku.hk/psychodp/ From yoh at psychology.rutgers.edu Tue May 17 21:39:26 2011 From: yoh at psychology.rutgers.edu (Yaroslav Halchenko) Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 21:39:26 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: Neuroscience software survey: What is popular, what has problems? Immediate results Message-ID: <20110518013926.GS7791@onerussian.com> Dear neuroscience researchers and their IT staff We invite you to participate in a survey on software usage and computing environments in neuroscience research. It will take no more than five minutes to fill it out. Immediately after sending your answers you will get to see a summary of how other participants have responded before. This data will eventually be made available to software vendors and distributors to determine advantages and issue of popular computing environments in neuroscience research. Learn about what fellow neuroscientists are doing to address their computing demands -- take the survey! http://goo.gl/euIMc Thanks, -- PyMVPA/NeuroDebian Team: Yaroslav O. Halchenko & Michael Hanke Postdoctoral Fellows, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755 From hosengbeng at nus.edu.sg Wed May 18 05:09:03 2011 From: hosengbeng at nus.edu.sg (Ho Seng Beng) Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 17:09:03 +0800 Subject: Connectionists: Research Positions Available for Neural Networks/Cognitive Science In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9E19ADE3-573E-47DF-8CE1-8C65DD8C37F6@mimectl> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110518/19faae9c/attachment.html From ted.carnevale at yale.edu Wed May 18 13:15:05 2011 From: ted.carnevale at yale.edu (Ted Carnevale) Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 13:15:05 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: deadline for NEURON 2011 Summer Course approaching Message-ID: <4DD3FE99.20901@yale.edu> A very few seats remain open for the NEURON 2011 Summer Course, and the deadline for signing up is June 1--just two weeks from today--so if you are interested, you should act quickly. Topics to be covered in this course include key features of NEURON's GUI, programming NEURON in hoc and Python, modeling of individual neurons and networks, and parallel simulations on hardware ranging from multicore PCs and Macs to workstation clusters and parallel supercomputers. For more information and an on-line registration form, see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2011/nscsd2011.html or contact Ted Carnevale Neurobiology Dept. Yale University School of Medicine PO Box 208001 New Haven, CT 06520-8001 phone 203-494-7381 email ted.carnevale at yale.edu Supported in part by: National Institutes of Health Institute for Neural Computation http://inc.ucsd.edu/ Contractual terms require inclusion of the following statement: This course is not sponsored by the University of California. From samn at neurosim.downstate.edu Fri May 20 16:43:28 2011 From: samn at neurosim.downstate.edu (Sam Neymotin) Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 16:43:28 -0400 Subject: Connectionists: New model of neocortex Message-ID: <201105202043.p4KKhSPi005386@ru.neurosim.downstate.edu> We are pleased to announce the recent publication of our research on a neocortical simulation in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, special issue on Structure, dynamics and function of brains: Emergence of physiological oscillation frequencies in a computer model of neocortex. by Neymotin SA, Lee H, Park E, Fenton AA and Lytton WW (2011) The article is available here: http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2011.00019/full and the NEURON computer model is available here: http://senselab.med.yale.edu/ModelDB/ShowModel.asp?model=138379 In this article we simulated a moderately-detailed neuronal network model with detailed wiring and found that it was able to reproduce physiological oscillation patterns observed in-vivo. Direct comparison of the power spectra with experimentally recorded local field potentials from prefrontal cortex of awake rat showed substantial similarities, including comparable patterns of cross-frequency coupling. We performed wiring perturbations and found that adding hubs in layer 2/3 excitatory cells had a substantial influence on network activity, suggesting that this subpopulation was a primary generator of theta/beta. Similarly, layer 2/3 interneurons appeared largely responsible for gamma activation through attenuation of the rest of the spectrum. The network displayed frequency homeostasis: increased activation of supragranular layers increased firing rates in the network without altering the spectral profile, and alteration in synaptic delays did not significantly shift spectral peaks. -- The authors From l.s.smith at cs.stir.ac.uk Sun May 22 11:40:20 2011 From: l.s.smith at cs.stir.ac.uk (Leslie Smith) Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 16:40:20 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: ACIB 2011: deadline extended to 30 June 2011. Message-ID: <575E378A-D76C-40D7-AEC7-2CFF32E105C8@cs.stir.ac.uk> ACIB 2011, the 1st Annual Conference on Integral Biomathics: aims to disturb the elephants in the room. What elephants? The ones right in the middle: if computers can emulate anything does that mean they are all that is necessary to create aware (living?) systems? is Turing-based computation/information processing all that there is? what's the difference between living and non-living systems? what's (if anything!) is missing that would be needed to create aware systems (These are the issues that the EU flagships ignore!) The conference will take place at the University of Stirling, Scotland, 29-31 August 2011. The conference addresses alternatives to von Neumann/Turing approaches to biological information processing including distinguishing living/non-living entities. The meeting is part of the EU INBIOSA Support Action. The meeting will have a diverse set of presentation types, including the usual talks, posters (with poster spotlights), and Pecha-Kucha (also known as Lightning) talks. For fuller details, see the call for papers, at http://www.inbiosa.eu/en/Workshops-And-Conferences.html Note that the deadline has been extended to 30 June 2011 --Leslie Smith Professor Leslie S. Smith B.Sc. Ph.D. SMIEEE, Head, Institute of Computing Science and Mathematics, School of Natural Sciences University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland l.s.smith at cs.stir.ac.uk Tel (44) 1786 467435 Fax (44) 1786 464551 www http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss/ Professor Leslie S. Smith B.Sc. Ph.D. SMIEEE, Head, Institute of Computing Science and Mathematics, School of Natural Sciences University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland l.s.smith at cs.stir.ac.uk Tel (44) 1786 467435 Fax (44) 1786 464551 www http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss/ -- The Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year 2009/2010 The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110522/cccef0da/attachment.html From jutta.kretzberg at uni-oldenburg.de Mon May 23 06:20:54 2011 From: jutta.kretzberg at uni-oldenburg.de (Jutta Kretzberg) Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 12:20:54 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: Positions at University of Oldenburg, Germany, Centre for Hearing Research Message-ID: <4DDA3506.20102@uni-oldenburg.de> University of Oldenburg, Centre for Hearing Research For establishing junior research groups for the Research Cluster ?Hearing for all? (*www.hearing4all.de*) that has entered the final round of the German excellence initiative, we are seeking for * a) 5 Postdoctoral fellows (E13/14, 2 years initial term) b) Senior research fellow (A13, 3 +3 year term) c) Junior professor (W1, 3+3 years term)* in one of the following areas ? Hearing research ? Audio Signal processing ? Audiology and medical acoustics ? Auditory neuroscience (1 PostDoc Position) ? Implementing an auditory brain-computer interface (1 PostDoc Position) ? Speech communication (details of the positions see www.hearing4all.de --> Jobs). Option for a prolongation and (competitive) options for a tenured position depend on the success of the cluster application. For positons a) (3 positions), b) and c) we are seeking for candidates with a PhD (or equivalent) degree in electrical or biomedical engineering, physics or computer science, who have an excellent research and publication record in the field of acoustics, signal processing, speech processing and/or auditory perception. For one of the Postdoctoral positions a), candidates should have an excellent PhD in Biology, Neuroscience, Genetics or related relevant subjects. They are especially qualified if they have experience with one of the following methods: neurophysiological in vivo or in vitro recording, imaging (e. g., voltage sensitive dyes) or RNAi interferenceof the PostDoc For one of the Postdoctoral positions a), condidates should have an excellend PhD in Psychology, Biology, Physiology or a related subject and international publications and practical experience in the areas Psychophysiology (EEG), Advanced computational skills and Signal analysis techniques (e. g. FFT). A strong interest in interdisciplinary and application-oriented work, familiarity with scientific tools and programming languages, as well as good English language skills are required. The successful applicant will join one of the research groups in the centre for hearing research that is performing top-level hearing research and its applications to hearing instruments within the cluster ?Hearing4all? in an interdisciplinary and research-sector-transcending environment (see www.hearing4all.de). In case of a success in the ongoing grant application procedures, the successful candidate should actively contribute to the envisaged Forschergruppe ?Individualisierte H?rakustik? and the envisaged cluster of excellence ?Hearing4all?. Within this framework, successful applicants will have the chance to establish their own junior research group and to acquire one of the tenure track options available for successful postdoctoral researchers in this program. Applications (including a CV and a list of publications) should be sent to the Centre for hearing research, Universit?t Oldenburg, D-26111 Oldenburg, Germany. Review of applications will start on May 31st, 2011. The University of Oldenburg is an equal-opportunity employer that seeks to increase the percentage of female faculty members. Women qualified for this position are therefore especially encouraged to apply. Applicants with disabilities will be preferentially considered in case of equal qualifications. Further information: Prof. Dr. Dr. Birger Kollmeier (birger.kollmeier at uni-oldenburg.de) From maneesh+connectionists at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk Fri May 27 06:03:36 2011 From: maneesh+connectionists at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk (maneesh+connectionists@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk) Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 11:03:36 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: IMA Computational Neuroscience: reminder, deadline approaching Message-ID: The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Computational Neuroscience University of Plymouth, UK, 5-7 September 2011 Call for Papers The complexity, apparent stochasticity, and sheer scale of the circuitry of the brain and the behaviour it expresses may well pose unique challenges to our capacity for mathematical description. Real progress will depend on maintaining strong links between the mathematical and empirical communities. As such, our goal in this meeting is to bring together mathematicians and neuroscientists with a shared focus on how mathematical tools can be brought to bear on understanding the function of the system. Submissions are invited to address any of the following: * model-driven analyses of neural and behavioural data at a range of different scales, that reveal essential aspects of the processing function(s) of the system. * mathematical analysis of the computational function of the nervous system, with particular emphasis on how this analysis informs our understanding of neural circuitry. * mathematical analysis of the structure of neural components and circuits, with particular emphasis on how this structure underlies neural computations. Papers will be accepted for the conference based on a 100-200 word abstract. Abstracts should be submitted by 3 June 2011 either online at http://online.ima.org.uk/ or by email to conferences at ima.org.uk Organising Committee Sue Denham (University of Plymouth) Maneesh Sahani (Conference Chair) (Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, London) Simon Schultz (Imperial College, London) Daniel Wolpert (University of Cambridge) For further Information visit the conference website: http://www.ima.org.uk/viewItem.cfm?cit_id=383310 From nando at cs.ubc.ca Mon May 23 21:14:56 2011 From: nando at cs.ubc.ca (Nando de Freitas) Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 18:14:56 -0700 Subject: Connectionists: New Mitacs Postdoc Program in Canada Message-ID: Dear all, Mitacs has begun providing funds for postdoctoral research in the mathematical sciences in British Columbia. So if you're interested in doing a post-doc in machine learning and neural computation, while getting some industrial experience, this is a good opportunity. BC has many great companies interested in ML and neural computation in several domains: energy prediction and sustainability, quantum computing, recommender systems, etc. There's more information about UBC's ML and neural computation group at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/cs-research/lci/research-groups/machine-learning SFU is another good university in BC to work in this area. Best, Nando de Freitas _______________________________________ We are pleased to inform you that Mitacs Elevate is now offered in British Columbia. Previously only available in Ontario Mitacs Elevate is a unique program for postdoctoral fellows to develop research collaborations with local industry. This competitive program also includes a large training component with the intention of helping PDFs to develop the skills that they will need in their future careers. Applicants may apply to the program with or without an industrial partner though preference will be given to those applicants with company support. For more information please see www.mitacs.ca/elevate. For detailed information regarding program eligibility please download the Program Guide for BC from the website. Applications are due June 13th, 2011 and fellowships must begin between September 1st and December 31st, 2011. If you have any questions please contact Melinda Benn (mbenn at mitacs.ca). From zhaoping at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk Fri May 27 06:10:30 2011 From: zhaoping at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk (Dr Zhaoping Li) Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 11:10:30 +0100 (BST) Subject: Connectionists: last call -submission deadline June 1st, for Beijing Computational Neuroscience Symposium this summer Message-ID: This symposium will be held on July 13-14, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Submission deadline: June 1st, 2011. See http://cns.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/biscon11/ What: An intensive, high quality, two day symposium on computational neuroscience, organized by Tsinghua University Medical School, will feature presentations of theories, models, and theory/model- motivated experiments in neuroscience. Most presentations will be contributed posters, allowing extensive interactions and exchanges between participants. Additionally, there will be two tutorials and a few invited oral presentations (see below). The topics of interests include, but are not limited to, computational theories and models of vision or other sensory processes, motor control, learning, memory, and decision making; physiological and psychological experiments to test or develop computational theories, such as electrophysiology to test theories of visual attention, and human psychophysics to explore models of visual adaptation, inference, and perceptual learning; inter-disciplinary investigations in neural encoding and decoding, learning and plasticity, neural circuits and networks, etc. This symposium aims to encourage interaction between computational and experimental communities, and between the regional and international communities of computational neuroscience, and to foster and encourage interest among students and young researchers in this field. We hope that such interactions and exchanges will lead to collaborations between participants. Invited Tutorial and symposium speakers: Invited Tutorial speakers Jeremy Wolfe ? Visual search, experiments and models Mitsuo Kawato ?- Computational motor control and BMI There will be two hours of lectures on each topic on July 13th. Invited Symposium Speakers include: Robert Desimone (MIT, USA) --- Interaction between frontal and visual cortex in attention Mitsuo Kawato (ATR, Japan) ?- Perceptual learning incepted by decoded fMRI neurofeedback without visual stimulus presentation Guosong Liu (Tsinghua University, China) ? Enhancement of cognition Fred Wolf (Max Planck Institute for dynamics and self-organization, Goettingen, Germany) ? Title to be announced. Some names of the participants and contributors are Fang Fang (Peking University, China), Barbara Gilliam (University of New South Wales, Australia) Bo Hong (Tsinghua University, China), Yi Jiang (Institute of Psyclogy, CAS, China) Zili Liu (UCLA, USA) Zuxiang Liu (Institute of biophysics, academic sinica, China) *Hiro Nakahara (RIKEN, Japan), Ning Qian (Columbia University, US), Sen Song (Tsinghua University, China), Taro Toyoizumi (RIKEN, Japan) *Misha Tsodyks (Weismann Institute, Israel) Wei Wang (Institute of Neuroscience, China) Katsumi Watanabe (University of Tokyo, Japan) Si Wu (Institute of Neuroscience, China), Cong Yu (Beijing Normal University, China) Li Zhaoping (University College London, UK/Tsinghua University, China). (*, not confirmed) Symposium committee: Bo Hong, Ning Qian, Sen Song, and Li Zhaoping. For information for the past symposium (2009 and 2010), see http://cns.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/biscon10/ and http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Zhaoping.Li/BeijingMeeting2009.html Call for contributions and participations: Researchers and students are encouraged to contribute and participate in the symposium. Registration is required, early registration is recommended if you want to secure a place. To contribute a poster presentation, please submit an abstract (max 200 words) together with a one to two A4 page summary of the work in a pdf file at the registration website. Submission deadline is June 10th, 2010. The submissions will be reviewed by the symposium committee. Limited travel support funds are available to help some Chinese students and young researchers to participate in the symposium. Preference will be given to those who present their work. Please contact the symposium organization to apply for financial assistance for travel if needed. Registration: Registration is required to participate in the symposium, early registration is recommended if you want to secure a place. The registration is free for students who do not sign up for symposium dinner. For non-students, the registration costs 450 yuan (about 69 US dollars), or 200 yuan for students who like to sign up for symposium dinner. Receipts will be provided for all registration payments (payable ASAP or when you arrive at the symposium) received. Submission: Please go to Registration to submit poster contributions. Each submission requires an abstract (max 200 words) and a summary (1-2 A4 pages in a pdf file) of the work. Submission deadline is June 1st, 2010. The submissions will be reviewed by the symposium committee with decision about one week after the deadline. Enquiries: Please email biscon11 at gmail.com, or, for urgent enquiries to lizhaoping at tsinghua.edu.cn. Sponsorships: Tsinghua University Medical school, Tsinghua University Computational Neuroscience Laboratory, Tsinghua University. From R.Bogacz at bristol.ac.uk Fri May 27 06:18:05 2011 From: R.Bogacz at bristol.ac.uk (Rafal Bogacz) Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 11:18:05 +0100 Subject: Connectionists: Senior Lecturer/ Reader in Computational Neuroscience at Bristol Message-ID: <4DDF7A5D.7070300@bristol.ac.uk> Dear Colleagues, I would like to let you know that the University of Bristol has an open Senior Lecturer / Reader position in Computational Neuroscience, and I attach the details of the position below: Salary: 46,696 - 52,556 GBP Closing date for applications: 9:00am 27 Jun 2011 Description: Based in the Merchant Venturers School of Engineering you will be an outstanding individual to enhance our activity in Computational Neuroscience. The appointment will be made at Senior Lecturer/ Reader level (equivalent of Associate Professor). You will have substantial academic experience, an international reputation and a proven track record for research leadership. Applicants who have a solid track record of collaboration with experimental neuroscientists are particularly welcome, as we expect you to start new collaborations with researchers from the vibrant and diverse Bristol Neuroscience community. Recently, University of Bristol received a prestigious grant from the Wellcome Trust for a Doctoral Training Centre in Neural Dynamics. It provides 4-year studentships for 23 PhD students who will be co-supervised by experimental neuroscientists and theoreticians. Therefore, the post-holder will have great opportunities for developing research programme through supervising PhD students. Additionally, you will be an enthusiastic lecturer and contribute to teaching postgraduate and undergraduate students in Computer Science. The University of Bristol offers an excellent research environment for Computational Neuroscience, as it gathers internationally acknowledged leaders in key related areas both from an experimental and theoretical perspective. Bristol has one of the largest concentrations of neuroscientists in Europe and is a major centre for basic and clinical neuroscience, brought together by Bristol Neuroscience (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/neuroscience/). Bristol is also home to internationally recognized experts in Computer Science, Mathematics and Robotics. It has a strong history of interdisciplinary research, and particular, using mathematics and computer models to tackle fundamental questions in neuroscience, ranging from cellular through system and cognitive to clinical. Informal enquiries should be made to Dr Neill Campbell (email: Neill.Campbell at bristol.ac.uk) as Head of Department or Professor Nishan Canagarajah as Head of School (email: Nishan.Canagarajah at bristol.ac.uk). Research enquiries should be made to Dr Rafal Bogacz (email: R.Bogacz at bristol.ac.uk). It is expected that interviews will be held during August 2011. Full information about the position and application process is available at: http://www.bris.ac.uk/boris/jobs/feeds/ads?ID=96653 Best wishes, Rafal From qitian at cs.utsa.edu Mon May 30 00:24:43 2011 From: qitian at cs.utsa.edu (Qi Tian) Date: Sun, 29 May 2011 23:24:43 -0500 Subject: Connectionists: Vision Summer School in Chendu, China, August 7-14, 2011 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I am sorry if you receieve this message multiple times. =============================================================================== *Call for Participation* USA-Sino Summer School in Vision, Learning and Pattern Recognition: Large-scale Media Computing (VLPR2011 ) Join us and experience a unique opportunity for scientific and cultural exchange. The theme of Summer VLPR2011 School is ?Large-scale Media Computing?. This summer school brings together a team of leading American researchers from Universities and Industrial Corporate Labs in computer vision, multimedia, machine learning, and pattern recognition. In addition, a number of invited talks provide a good glimpse of the emerging interaction and integration of academic research and industry practice. *Location*: Chengdu, P.R. China; *Time*: August 7-14, 2011. *How to Apply*? We invite all qualified master and Ph.D. students in the fields of computer vision, multimedia, machine learning and pattern recognition, etc. *US Citizenships or Permanent Residency are required to apply*. The qualified students will be sponsored the related expenses (the round-trip airfare up to a cap, hotel, lunch, banquet and reception, and visa fee) to attend VLPR 2011. To apply, please email your CV and a letter of reference to qitian at cs.utsa.edu; by June 15, 2011 or as soon as the positions are filled. Learn more about our speakers and school program at http://www.uestcrobot.net/vlpr2011 List of Speakers and Invited Talks (in alphabetic order): ? *Alex Hauptmann*(Senior Systems Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University) ? *Ramesh Jain*(Professor, University of California, Invine) ? *Yanxi Liu* (Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University) ? *Jiebo Luo*(Senior Principal Scientist, Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, NY ) ? *Silvio Savarese* (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) ? *Maburak Shah*(Professor, University of Central Florida), ? *John Smith*(Senior Manager, IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY), ? *Stefano Soatto*(Professor, University of California, Los Angeles) *VLPR 2011 Organizing Committee* Yi Ma, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Asia, China (Co-Director) Qi Tian, Associate Professor, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA (Co-Director) Shulin Tian, Professor and Dean of School of Automation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), China (Co-Director) Fei-Fei Li, Assistant Professor, Stanford University, USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110530/59dd4830/attachment-0001.html From laurenz.wiskott at rub.de Tue May 31 03:47:07 2011 From: laurenz.wiskott at rub.de (Laurenz Wiskott) Date: 31 May 2011 09:47:07 +0200 Subject: Connectionists: =?utf-8?b?4oCcSnVuaW9ycHJvZmVzc29y4oCdIChXMSkg?= =?utf-8?q?with_tenure_track_at_the_INI_in_Bochum=2C_Germany?= Message-ID: <20110531074707.GB6120@cinnamon> Please forward this to potential applicants. Thanks, Laurenz Wiskott. ============================================================================== The Ruhr-Universit?t Bochum (RUB) is one of Germany?s leading research universities. The University draws its strengths from both the diversity and the proximity of scienti?c and engineering disciplines on a single, coherent campus. This highly dynamic setting enables students and researchers to work across traditional boundaries of academic subjects and faculties. The RUB is a vital institution in the Ruhr area, which has been selected as European Capital of Culture for the year 2010. The Ruhr-Universit?t Bochum Institute for Neural Computation invites applications for the position of a ?Juniorprofessor? (W1) with tenure track to start on August 1, 2011. The future holder of the post will represent the subject ?Theory of Machine Teaching? in research and teaching. Research should focus preferably on autonomous learning under real-time conditions with potential applications in the cognitive or neurosciences, in autonomous robotics, computer vision, or other areas of technical information processing. This will enable our prospective colleague to contribute to the research emphasis on neuroscience and computational engineering of the RuhrUniversity. Experience and interest in interdisciplinary scienti?c research and in obtaining independent funding for research projects are important qualities of a successful candidate. Teaching will contribute to the degree program in Applied Computer Science. A willingness to contribute to the teaching of core computer science courses is expected as well as didactic skills and a pronounced dedication to teaching. After a successful evaluation, the junior professor will also be expected to contribute to administrative tasks. The Ruhr-University Bochum is an equal opportunity employer. Complete applications, preferably in electronic form, should be sent before the 30th of June 2011 to the Director of the Institute, Prof. Gregor Sch?ner (gregor.schoener at rub.de), who will also be happy to provide further information. From erhan at atr.jp Sun May 29 11:55:10 2011 From: erhan at atr.jp (Erhan Oztop) Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 00:55:10 +0900 Subject: Connectionists: HUMANOIDS 2011 - SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED (June 15) Message-ID: <4DE26C5E.7030702@atr.jp> Dear Connectionists, IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots is an interdisciplinary forum for neural networks, cognitive and computational neuroscience and computational modeling in addition to robotics, which is directed towards the design and development of human-like robots. We would like to ask for your contribution to this conference. The details are given below. Erhan Oztop NICT/ATR, Japan * HUMANOIDS 2011 - SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED * (Due to numerous requests, Humanoids 2011 deadline for papers and workshop proposals has been extended. The new deadline is June 15, 11:59 pm Pacific Time) =========================================================== HUMANOIDS 2011 : 11th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots Conference Venue : Golf Hotel, Bled, Slovenia Conference Dates : October 26, 27, 28, 2011 New Submission Deadline : June 15, 2011, 11:59 pm Pacific Time Acceptance Decisions : August 6, 2011 Conference Website : http://www.humanoids2011.org =========================================================== The 11th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2011) will be held on October 26-28, 2011, in the Alpine town of Bled in Slovenia. Bled is easily accessible from the Ljubljana Airport which has excellent connections to all major European hubs. The conference is sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Papers from academic institutions, industrial communities, and government agencies are solicited in all areas related to humanoid robotics including, but not limited to, mechatronics, control, perception, planning, learning, neural and behavioral sciences, and human-robot interaction. Contributed papers will be presented either at a single track oral presentation session or at poster sessions. All the contributed papers will appear without distinction in the conference proceedings as well as in IEEE Xplore. For general inquiries about the conference, please contact the conference secretariat at humanoids at ijs.si. The official call for papers with more details can be found at http://www.humanoids2011.org/cfp.pdf, which can also be accessed through the conference website. For paper submissions and other details, please refer to the conference website at http://www.humanoids2011.org. IMPORTANT DATES (deadline extension applied): June 15, 2011 Submission of full-length papers June 15, 2011 Proposals for tutorials/workshops August 6, 2011 Notification of paper acceptance September 6, 2011 Submission of final camera-ready papers ORGANIZING COMMITTEE -------------------- General Chair: Ale Ude, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia General co-Chairs: Rudiger Dillmann, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany Stefan Schaal, University of Southern California, USA Program co-Chairs: Nancy Pollard, CMU, USA Jun Morimoto, ATR, Japan Tamim Asfour, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany Finance Chair: Bojan Nemec, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia Publications Chair: Andrej Gams, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia Tutorials/Workshops co-Chairs: Giorgio Metta, Italian Institute of Technology Ales Leonardis, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Awards co-Chairs: Gordon Cheng, Technical University of Munich, Germany Kazuhito Yokoi, AIST, Japan Publicity Chair: Erhan Oztop, ATR, Japan ----------------------------- http://www.humanoids2011.org/ From jamesk at cse.ust.hk Tue May 31 05:49:15 2011 From: jamesk at cse.ust.hk (James Kwok) Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 17:49:15 +0800 Subject: Connectionists: ICONIP2011 Submission Deadline extended Message-ID: <4DE4B99B.1040606@cse.ust.hk> Apologies for multiple postings. --------------------------------------------------- Due to numerous requests, the submission deadline of ICONIP2011 has been extended to June 22, 2011. --------------------------------------------------- 18th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP2011) November 14-17, 2011 Majesty Plaza Hotel (http://majestyplazashanghai.com/), Shanghai, China Website: http://iconip2011.sjtu.edu.cn/index.html The 2011 International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2011) will be held in Shanghai, China. It is an annual event, organized since 1994 by the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). ICONIP 2011 aims to provide a high-level international forum for scientists, engineers, educators, and students to address new challenges, share solutions, and discuss future research directions in neural information processing and real-world applications. Several post-conference workshops, including the 4th International Cybersecurity and Data Mining workshop (CDM2011) and the 2nd Shanghai Workshop on Brain-Computer Interface and Its Applications, will be held on November 18, 2011 at the Xizi Hotel (http://xizihotel.com) in Hangzhou, China. Shanghai is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. It sits on the Yangtze River Delta on China's eastern coast, and is roughly equidistant from Beijing and Hong Kong. The city is an emerging tourist destination renowned for its historical landmarks such as the Bund and Xintiandi, its modern and ever-expanding Pudong skyline including the Oriental Pearl Tower, and its new reputation as a cosmopolitan center of culture and design. Today, Shanghai is the largest center of commerce and finance in mainland China, and has been described as the "showpiece" of the world's fastest-growing economy. Hangzhou is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang Province in Eastern china and is located on the Hangzhou Bay 180 kilometers (110 mi) southwest of Shanghai. It has also been one of the most renowned and prosperous cities of China for much of the last 1,000 years, due in part to its beautiful natural scenery; the city's West Lake is its most well-known attraction. Hangzhou is serviced by the Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport. The Shanghai-Hangzhou High-Speed Railway service was opened on October 26, 2010, shortening the duration of the 202 km trip between the two cities to 45 minutes. Accepted papers will be published by Springer in its series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Extended versions of selected good papers will be included, subject to another peer review acceptance/rejection process, in special Issues of "Neurocomputing" and "Neural Computing and Applications". Topics for the conference include, but not limited to: - Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Science - Models, Methods and Inference - Vision and Auditory Modeling - Control, Robotics and Hardware - Novel approaches and Applications Authors are invited to submit full-length papers (10 pages maximum) by the submission deadline through the online submission system. The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review or copyright-protected elsewhere and will be presented by an author if accepted. All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the field based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. Important Date: Full Paper Submission Deadline - June 22, 2011 Notification of Acceptance - August 1, 2011 ICONIP Secretariat: iconip2011 at sjtu.edu.cn From dianne.nguyen at monash.edu Mon May 30 00:50:40 2011 From: dianne.nguyen at monash.edu (Dianne Nguyen) Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 14:50:40 +1000 Subject: Connectionists: CFP - Solomonoff 85th Memorial Conference Message-ID: *3rd Call for Papers* Apologies for cross posting Solomonoff 85th Memorial Conference http://www.Solomonoff85thMemorial.monash.edu/ Proceedings of this multi-disciplinary conference will be published by Springer in the prestigious LNAI (LNCS) series ******************************************************************************************** Dear Colleague You are cordially invited to submit a paper and participate at Solomonoff 85th Memorial Conference which, will be held in Melbourne, Australia, between 30 November - 2 December 2011 with the possibility of a tutorial/workshop being organised on the 29th November 2011. This multi-disciplinary Conference will be run back to back with the AI 2011 Conference in Perth, Australia. This is a multi-disciplinary conference based on the wide range of applications of work related to or inspired by that of Ray Solomonoff. The contributions sought for this conference include, but are not restricted to, the following:- Statistical inference and prediction, Econometrics *(including time series and panel data)*, in Principle proofs of financial market inefficiency, Theories of (quantifying) intelligence and new forms of *(universal)*intelligence test *(for robotic, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial life)*, the Singularity(or infinity point ), when machine intelligence surpasses that of humans), the future of science, Philosophy of science, the Problem of induction, Evolutionary (tree) models in biology and linguistics, Geography, Climate modelling and bush-fire detection, Environmental science, Image processing, Spectral analysis, Engineering, Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, Statistics and Philosophy, Mathematics, Linguistics, Computer science, Data mining, Bioinformatics, Computational intelligence, Computational science, Life sciences, Physics, Knowledge discovery, Ethics, Computational biology, Computational linguistics, Collective intelligence, structure and computing connectivity of random nets, effect of Heisenberg's principle on channel capacity, Arguments that entropy is not the arrow of time, and etc. See also Ray Solomonoff's Publications (and his obituary ). (For more details, please see Extended Call for Papers .) *General and Program Chair* David Dowe, Monash University, Australia *Program Committee* Andrew Barron, Statistics, Yale University, USA Greg Chaitin, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA Fouad Chedid, Notre Dame University, Lebanon Bertrand Clarke, Medical Statistics, University of Miami, USA A. Phil Dawid, Statistics, Cambridge University, UK Peter Gacs, Boston University, USA Alex Gammerman, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK John Goldsmith, Linguistics, University of Chicago, USA Marcus Hutter, Australian National University, Australia Leonid Levin, Boston University, USA Ming Li, Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Canada John McCarthy, Stanford University, USA *(Turing Award winner)* Marvin Minsky, MIT, USA *(Turing Award winner)* Kee Siong Ng, ANU & EMC Corp, Australia Teemu Roos, University of Helsinki, Finland Juergen Schmidhuber, IDSIA, Switzerland Farshid Vahid, Econometrics, Monash University, Australia William Uther, University of New South Wales, Australia Paul Vitanyi, CWI, The Netherlands Vladimir Vovk, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK *Co-ordinator* Dianne Nguyen, Monash University, Australia You will find more information about the Conference at the following Website: http://www.Solomonoff85thMemorial.monash.edu/ For more details on how to submit a paper(s), please refer to the Submission Page at: http://www.Solomonoff85thMemorial.infotech.monash.edu/submission.html *Important Dates* Extended Deadline of Paper Submission: *16 June 2011* Notification of Acceptance of Paper: *10 August 2011* Receipt of Camera-Ready Copy: *5 September 2011* Conference Dates: *30 Nov. - 2 Dec. 2011* I look forward to receiving your valuable paper contribution and attendance at the Conference. David Dowe General Chairman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/mailman/private/connectionists/attachments/20110530/a87bc863/attachment-0001.html From chiestand at salk.edu Tue May 17 23:35:58 2011 From: chiestand at salk.edu (Chris Hiestand) Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 03:35:58 -0000 Subject: Connectionists: NIPS 2011 Call For Workshops Message-ID: NIPS 2011 Call For Workshops Natural and Synthetic NIPS*2011 Post-Conference Workshops December 16 and 17, 2011 Hotel Meli? Sol y Nieve and Sierra Nevada, Granada, SPAIN Following the regular program of the Neural Information Processing Systems 2011 conference in Granada, Spain, workshops on a variety of current topics in neural information processing will be held on December 16 and 17, 2011, in Sierra Nevada, Spain. We invite researchers interested in chairing one of these workshops to submit proposals for workshops. The goal of the workshops is to provide an informal forum for researchers to discuss important research questions and challenges. Controversial issues, open problems, and comparisons of competing approaches are not only encouraged but preferred as workshop topics. Representation of alternative viewpoints and panel-style discussions are also particularly encouraged. Potential workshop topics include, but are not limited to: Active Learning, Attention, Audition, Bayesian Networks, Bayesian Statistics, Benchmarking, Biophysics, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Computational Complexity, Control, Genetic/Evolutionary Algorithms, Graph Theory, Graphical Models, Hippocampus and Memory, Human-Computer Interfaces, Implementations, Kernel Methods, Mean-Field Methods, Music, Natural Language Processing, Network Dynamics, Neural Coding, Neural Plasticity, Neuromorphic Systems, On-Line Learning, Optimization, Perceptual Learning, Robotics, Rule Extraction, Self-Organization, Signal Processing, Social Networks, Spike Timing, Speech, Supervised/Unsupervised Learning, Time Series, Topological Maps, and Vision. Detailed descriptions of previous workshops may be found at: http://nips.cc/Conferences/2010/Program/schedule.php?Session=Workshops There will be seven hours of workshop meetings per day, split into morning and afternoon sessions, with free time between the sessions for ongoing individual exchange or outdoor activities. Selected workshops may be invited to submit proceedings for publication in the post-NIPS workshops monographs series published by the MIT Press. Workshop organizers have several responsibilities, including: *Coordinating workshop participation and content, including arranging short informal presentations by experts, arranging for expert commentators to sit on discussion panels, formulating discussion topics, etc. *Providing the program for the workshop in a timely manner for the workshop booklet. *Moderating the discussion, and reporting its findings and conclusions to the group during the evening plenary sessions. *Writing a brief summary and/or coordinating submitted material for post-conference electronic dissemination. Submission Instructions A nips.cc account is required to submit the Workshops application. Please follow the url below and check the required format for the application well before the deadline for workshop proposals. You can edit your application online right up until the deadline. Interested parties must submit a proposal by 23:59 UTC on July 1st, 2011. Proposals should be submitted electronically at the following URL: https://nips.cc/Workshops/ Preference will be given to workshops that reserve a significant portion of time for open discussion or panel discussion, as opposed to a pure "mini-conference" format. We suggest that organizers allocate at least 50% of the workshop schedule to questions, discussion, and breaks. Past experience suggests that workshops otherwise degrade into mini-conferences as talks begin to run over. For the same reason, we strongly recommend that each workshop include no more than 12 talks per day. This year we'd like to attempt to partially unify the NIPS workshop important dates across all of the workshops. Therefore, please consider using the following date guidelines for your workshop: * Your workshop call should be publicized on or before August 30th, 2011. * Submission deadline should be on or before September 23rd, 2011. * Acceptance decisions mailed out on or before October 15th, 2011. We stress that these are not mandatory, rather suggestions. If there are circumstances that would make your workshop difficult using these dates, you may use other dates. Also a call for contributions is not required and is orthogonal to the decision about workshop acceptance. NIPS does not provide travel funding for workshop speakers. In the past, some workshops have sought and received funding from external sources to bring in outside speakers. In any case, the organizers of each accepted workshop can name two individuals to receive free registration for the workshop program. Jeff Bilmes and Fernando Perez-Cruz NIPS*2011 Workshops Chairs Web URL: http://nips.cc/Conferences/2011/CallForWorkshops From chiestand at salk.edu Tue May 17 23:45:30 2011 From: chiestand at salk.edu (Chris Hiestand) Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 03:45:30 -0000 Subject: Connectionists: NIPS 2011 Call For Demonstrations Message-ID: <7A331D98-16DE-451A-AC04-4E5006524DB4@salk.edu> ============================================================= NIPS 2011 Call for Demonstrations ============================================================= Demonstration Proposal Deadline: Monday September 19, 2011 The Neural Information Processing Systems Conference 2011 http://nips.cc/Conferences/2011/ has a Demonstration Track running in parallel with the evening Poster Sessions, December 13-15, 2011, in Granada, Spain. Demonstrations are an opportunity to showcase: * Hardware technology * Software systems * Neuromorphic and biologically-inspired systems * Robotics or other systems, which are relevant to the technical areas covered by NIPS (see Call for Papers http://nips.cc/Conferences/2011/CallForPapers) . Demonstrations must show novel technology and must be live, preferably with some interactive parts. A demonstration is not just another poster presentation or a slide show, the action part is important. Submissions: Submission of demo proposals at the following URL: https://nips.cc/Demonstrators/ You will be asked to fill a questionnaire and describe clearly: * the technology demonstrated * the elements of novelty * the live part * the interactive part * the equipment brought by the demonstrator * the equipment required at the place of the demo Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be refereed on the basis of technical quality, novelty, live action, potential for interaction. Demonstration chair: Samy Bengio Call URL: http://nips.cc/Conferences/2011/CallForDemonstrations