|
he "First Annual Computational Neuroscience Symposium" was held in the Nils Hasselmo Hall at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on October 7 and 8, 1999. The conference was sponsored by the University of Minnesota Computational Neuroscience Program [which is funded by a National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program grant], the Neuroscience Graduate Program, the Scientific Computation Graduate Program, and the Supercomputing Institute for Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation. Eighty participants from five countries attended a day and a half of talks covering molecular mechanisms in ion channels, signal transduction, neurotransmission and receptors, computational models of vistibular and oculomotor control, robotics and computer vision, and neural network models.
|
|
Jan Hondzinski (left) of the University of Minnesota Department of Neuroscience presents her poster to Henrietta Galiana (right) of McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
|
The conference began Thursday morning with presentations by Mark Sansom of Oxford University, England and Harel Weinstein of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Sansom discussed a study that used a bacterial channel as the starting point for a homology model of a mammalian inwardly rectifying potassium channel, refined by molecular dynamics simulations, and for the pure domain of a voltage activated potassium channel. The discussion focused on how the implications of the simulation studies aided the understanding of excitable cell membranes. Weinstein spoke of current work on the mechanisms of G protein coupled receptors triggered by molecular recognition and leading to signal transduction and modulation. The focus was on receptor structure and ligand-induced transduction of the activation signal for a neurotransmitter.
Stephen Cannon of Harvard Medical School spoke about the use of both animal and computational models used to explore the physiological consequences of altered gating in mutant sodium channels for skeletal muscle excitability. A curious feature of skeletal muscle was shown to be that symptomatic attacks could result from either increased excitability or a loss of excitability.
Laurence Trussell of the Oregon Hearing Research Center and the Vollum Institute explained the dynamics of transmitter release and its role in shaping neural responses. The model Trussell expounded on suggested that sustained, plateau transmission is dependent largely on a rapid recovery of release sites, while desynchronization results from the enhancement of release probability of docked vesicles.
|
|
Mark Sansom (left) and Charlotte Capener (right) of the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at Oxford University in Oxford, England discuss and present their work in a poster paper presentation.
|
The Thursday afternoon sessions began with a presentation by Dora Angelaki of the Washington University School of Medicine. Angelaki spoke on the coding of movement in inertial space. The discussion focused on the computational problems and neuronal strategies and concluded that, even though the peripheral sensory transduction of motion is dictated and bound by the laws of physics, neural computations are centrally used by the brain to reinterpret sensory afferent signals and compute inertial motion.
Henrietta Galiana from McGill University, Canada followed with a discussion of system style models she is helping develop for the control of eye movements in several reflexes. Her presentation focused on the evolution of the control models used to develop this system.
|
|
Mitsuo Kawato (left) of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan talks with Andrew Barto (right) of the University of Massachusetts.
|
|
|
James Clark (left) of McGill University, Canada, Daniel Kersten (center) of the University of Minnesota, and Gregory Hager (right) of John Hopkins University.
|
James Clark from McGill University, Canada described some of the evidence for the premotor models of spatial attention and eye movements. One focus of his talk was on simulations of a computational model of spatial attention based on the premotor theory that replicates a wide range of phenomena related to the latencies of saccadic eye movements.
The day was concluded with a keynote address at the evening's banquet by Terrence Sejnowski of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California at San Diego.
The second day began with a presentation by Stephen Lisberger of the University of California School of Medicine on the reconstruction of commands for smooth pursuit eye movements from a population code of the dynamics of image motion. The focus was on how a series of neural and computational analyses were conducted that demonstrate how image velocity and acceleration are represented.
Gregory Hager of Johns Hopkins University followed with a discussion of the development of several control systems that make direct use of image information for vision-based tracking, manipulation, and navigation in three dimensions. The results showed a natural hierarchy of tasks that could be used to determine the level of information any system has about its underlying visual-motor system.
The conference concluded with presentations by Andrew Barto of the University of Massachusetts and Mitsuo Kawato of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, Japan. Barto spoke of a control architecture for a neuronal model that learned to reach using corrective movements and how it is motivated by the anatomy and physiology of the motor system. Results of simulations designed to explore the degree to which the model meets the computational challenges of controlling a dynamic arm were also presented. Kawato spoke of cerebellar internal models for both robotics and cognition. Several paired forward and inverse models were introduced and possible functional roles in hierarchical planning and communications were discussed.
In addition to these talks, eleven poster presentations were included in the symposium. The speakers and poster presentations shed light on this intensive field and helped make the conference a success.
|
|
