Neural Computation: Population Coding of High-Level Representations

The Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth and the Neukom Institute hosted the workshop, “Neural Computation: Population Coding of High-Level Representations”. The workshop, August 18 and 19, 2011 consisted of talks by about a dozen speakers with an emphasis on extensive discussion after each talk.

The theme of the workshop was computational approaches to modeling how complex stimuli are encoded in population responses and how to decode brain activity to identify the information content that is represented in population responses. The talks emphasized work in visual neuroscience but were not limited to visual representation.

In addition to the high-profile speakers, each speaker was invited to bring a junior member from their lab – grad student, post-doc, or junior faculty. A poster session to highlight the work of the junior colleagues was included as an effective way to enrich discussion and enable one-on-one discussions with senior investigators.

Videos of the speakers (in alphabetical order):

Charles Cadieu, PhD, Redwood Center for Neuroscience, UC Berkeley

Learning Intermediate-Level Representations of Form and Motion from Natural Movies

Ed Connor, Prof. of Neuroscience; Director, The Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins

Neural coding of object structure in the ventral visual pathway

Jim DiCarlo, MD, PhD, Assoc. Prof. of Neuroscience; McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT

Untangling object recognition: Which neuronal population codes can explain human object recognition performance?

Jack Gallant, Prof. of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; Director, The Gallant Lab, UC Berkeley

Using voxel-wise encoding models to discover brain representations and to decode brain activity

Jim Haxby, Evans Family Distinguished Professor; Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience; Prof. of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth

Building common, high-dimensional models of neural representational spaces

Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Faculty, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge

Representational similarity analysis of visual-object population codes

Tom Mitchell, Prof. of Computer Science; Chair, Machine Learning Dept., Carnegie Mellon

What neural activity encodes about stimuli, where and when

Alice O’Toole, Prof. Cognition and Neuroscience, UT Dallas

Understanding neural representation of facial identity, race, and viewpoint: Constraining the neural with the perceptual

Tomaso Poggio, Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior; Director of the Center for Biological and Computational Learning, MIT

The computational magic of the ventral stream: Towards a theory

Eero Simoncelli , Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Prof. of Neural Science, Mathematics and Psychology, NYU

Metamers of the ventral stream