Chris Eliasmith
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society joint Chapter of the Vancouver/Victoria Sections
Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences (IRMACS) Centre, SFU, Coast to Coast Seminar Spring 2012

Speaker: Dr. Chris Eliasmith
Department of Philosophy, Department of Systems Design Engineering
Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience,
Director, Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience
University of Waterloo

Title: How to Build a Brain: From Single Cells to Cognitive Systems
(Presentation is available in pdf format.)

Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 11:30 am - 12:20 pm
ASB 10901 (IRMACS Boardroom), Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Maps: IRMACS, SFU


Abstract

How do billions of single neurons result in the complex behaviors we observe in animals and in ourselves? In this talk, I discuss my lab's approach to answering this question. In short, we build large-scale simulations at the level of single cells, which exhibit a wide range of flexible, dynamic, and cognitive behaviors. I discuss why the principles we employ are reasonable, and describe the benefits, successes, and challenges of this research.

Biography

Professor Chris Eliasmith holds a Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience, and is director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. He has over 60 publications spanning neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and engineering, on topics including working memory, mental representation, population coding, neural dynamics, computation, automatic text classification, and cognitive architectures. His recent book, How to Build a Brain (Oxford), and his earlier book, Neural Engineering (MIT Press), provide a systemmatic method for constructing large-scale cognitive models in spiking neurons.


Last updated
Tuesday, February 21, 2012  3:29:54 PM PST.