Connectionists: Call for contributions NIPS Workshop on Large scale optical physiology

[Ferran Diego]

*NIPS Workshop on Large scale optical physiology: From data-acquisition 
to models of neural coding*

Montreal, Quebec. December 12, 2014
_
- Scope:_

Obtaining a detailed understanding of brain function remains a 
significant challenge. Major advances in recording technologies -- e.g. 
imaging calcium signals with 2-photon, light-sheet, or light-field 
microscopy -- are beginning to provide measurements of neural activity 
at unprecedented scales. Analytical tools will critical for the 
high-throughput acquisition and analysis of such large-scale datasets. 
In particular, our field needs scalable, reproducible computational 
approaches that are general enough to share and coordinate across 
groups, but flexible enough to extract meaning from a variety of problem 
settings. We also need analyses that examine the full richness of both 
single-neuron and population-level response properties and dynamics.
The goal of this workshop is to discuss challenges and opportunities for 
computational neuroscience and machine learning that arise from 
large-scale recording techniques:

    * What kind of data will be generated by large-scale functional
      measurements in the next decade? How will it be quantitatively or
      qualitatively different to the kind of data we have had
      previously? What will the computational bottlenecks be?
    * What are the key computational tools for high-throughput data
      acquisition, e. g. visualization/dimensionality
      reduction/information quantification? How can we identify the best
      algorithms and what are the limitations of existing techniques?
    * What can we learn from large-scale recordings that is
      fundamentally new? What theories could we test, if only we had
      access to recordings from more neurons? What kind of statistics
      will be powerful enough to verify/falsify population coding
      theories? What can we infer about network structure and dynamics?

We have invited scientists whose research directly addresses these 
questions, including both experimental and computational 
neuroscientists. We hope to foster active discussion among this 
multidisciplinary group, to clarify priorities and perspective, and 
coordinate key directions for future research. The target audience 
includes industry and academic researchers interested in machine 
learning, neuroscience, big data and statistical inference.

_- Link: _ 
http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de//Staff/fdiego/LargeScaleOpticalPhysiology/_

- Important Dates:_

     Submission Opens: September 1, 2014
     Abstract submission deadline (for poster presentations): October 9, 
2014
     Acceptance for poster presentation will be announced by October 23, 
2014
     Workshop Day: December 12, 2014

_- Call for Contributions:_

We invite abstract submissions for poster presentation at the workshop. 
Please submit abstracts (1 page max in pdf format) by email to 
*opticalphysiology(at)gmail.com*.

_- Organizers:_

<http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/Staff/fdiego/>Ferran Diego (Heidelberg 
Collaboratory for Image Processing, University of Heidelberg) _-- 
primary contact_
Jeremy Freeman (Janelia Research Campus)
Jakob Macke (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and 
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Tuebingen, Germany)
Il Memming Park (Neural Coding and Computation Lab, University of Texas 
at Austin)
Eftychios Pnevmatikakis (Department of Statistics and the Center for 
Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University)

-- 
Multidimensional Image Processing Group
University of Heidelberg, HCI
Speyerer Str. 6, D-69115 Heidelberg
Phone: +49 (0) 6221 -- 5280
E-Mail: ferran.diego at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/Staff/fdiego/

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