Connectionists: Summer semester short course on "Understanding biological vision" in Beijing, July 2-13 2012

[Dr Zhaoping Li]

There will be a 2-week summer semester short course on "Understanding 
biological vision, theory, data, and models" July 2-13, in Tsinghua 
University, Beijing.  This course will be mainly taught by Li Zhaoping 
(see www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Zhaoping.Li/),  additional invited
lecturers will be announced during the course. See
http://cns.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/summercourse2012/   for more details.


This course introduces neural mechanisms and cognitive behaviors in 
biological vision (particularly  human or primate vision). It emphasizes 
understanding the principles behind biological vision, and introduces 
computational models. The predictions of the theories and models are 
compared with or tested by experimental (physiological/psychological) 
data. The topics includes visual encoding (neural mechanisms, principles, 
and their modeling), visual attentional selection (neural mechanisms, 
cognitive phenomena,  models/theories and their experimental tests), and 
(more briefly) visual perception/recognition (mechanism, phenomena, 
models, and perspectives).

This  course is suitable for students with physical science background 
(physics/engineering/math/computer science) interested in learning 
biological visual mechanisms, principles, and phenomena (e.g., those with 
computer vision background are suitable). It is also suitable for those 
with biological vision science background  (e.g., vision neuroscientists, 
vision psychophysicists) to learn computational approaches.


Although this is a Tsinghua University Course, a limited number of spare 
seats in the lecture room will be available for interested students 
outside Tsinghua University to audit the course. Lectures will be 
in English (Chinese explanations/answers to questions will be available 
when requested).

For organization purpose, auditing students from outside Tsinghua 
University must register (see the course website), and be admitted on the 
basis of first-come-first-serve and the match between the 
skills/background of the students and the pre-requisite/content of the 
course.