Connectionists: Computational Brain-Mind: A distance learning course

[Juyang Weng]

Dear Colleagues,

This course will start from the following Monday.  You might like to 
suggest that some of your advisees take it.  Travel is not needed, since 
it is a distance learning course. Thanks.

Best regards,

-John Weng
Instructor


      BMI 871: Computational Brain-Mind

*A * *Distance Learning Course
* August 6 - 24, 2012
http://www.brain-mind-institute.org/bmi-871.html


        Course Description

This course introduces computational principles of biological brain, 
which give rise to the various functions of mind. An emphasis is on 
regarding the brain as a highly integrated developmental system so that 
the models and principles are applicable to small biological brains 
(e.g., fruit flies), large biological brains (e.g., humans), and 
artificial ones (e.g., machines and robots). The material integrates 
knowledge in computer science, neuroscience, psychology (also cognitive 
science), biology, electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, and 
other related disciplines. The course is suited for faculty, senior 
researchers, postdocs, and graduate students in any discipline --- 
natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences --- who are 
interested in studying how the brain-mind works. The subjects include: 
Computational development of biological brains. Machine's symbolic 
representations. Brain's emergent representations and architectures. 
Brain's spatial representations. Brain's temporal representations. 
Perception, cognition, attention (bottom-up and top-down), learning, 
behaviors, abstraction, reasoning, decision making. Vision, audition, 
touch, multimodality, and integration. Modulatory system: reinforcement, 
motivation and emotion. The above subjects are detailed down to neuronal 
computation, cutting across levels of molecules, synapses, cells, 
circuits, systems, brains, experience, functions, and group intelligence.

Examples of fundamental discipline questions to be discussed:

  * *Biology*: How do individually autonomous cells interact to give
    rise to animal behaviors?
  * *Neuroscience*: From an overarching perspective, how does the brain
    self-organize?
  * *Psychology*: How does an integrated brain architecture realize many
    psychological learning models (e.g., classical conditioning and
    instrumental conditioning)?
  * *Computer Science*: Why is the automata theory a special case of the
    brain's neural network theory?
  * *Electrical Engineering*: How does a brain perform general-purpose
    nonlinear control, beyond Kalman filtering?
  * *Mathematics*: How does a brain perform general-purpose
    high-dimensional, nonlinear optimization?
  * *Physics*: How do meanings arise from physics?

-- 
--
Juyang (John) Weng, Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program
3115 Engineering Building
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
Tel: 517-353-4388
Fax: 517-432-1061
Email: weng at cse.msu.edu
URL: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/
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