Optics
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Prof Ian Oldenburg
The Oldenburg lab combines optics, multiphoton optogenetics, calcium imaging, and computation to understand the motor system. The overall goal of the Oldenburg Lab is to understand the causal relationship between neural activity and motor actions. We use advanced optical techniques such as multiphoton holographic optogenetics to control neural activity with an incredible degree of precision, writing complex patterns of activity to distributed groups of cells. Only by writing activity into the brain at the scale in which it naturally occurs (individual neurons firing distinct patterns of action potentials) can we test theories of what population activity means. We read out the effects of these precise manipulations locally with calcium imaging, in neighboring brain regions with electrophysiology, and at the 'whole animal level' through changes in behavior. We are looking for curious motivated, and talented people with a wide range of skill sets to join our group at all levels from Technician to Postdoc.
Learning to see stuff
Humans are very good at visually recognizing materials and inferring their properties. Without touching surfaces, we can usually tell what they would feel like, and we enjoy vivid visual intuitions about how they typically behave. This is impressive because the retinal image that the visual system receives as input is the result of complex interactions between many physical processes. Somehow the brain has to disentangle these different factors. I will present some recent work in which we show that an unsupervised neural network trained on images of surfaces spontaneously learns to disentangle reflectance, lighting and shape. However, the disentanglement is not perfect, and we find that as a result the network not only predicts the broad successes of human gloss perception, but also the specific pattern of errors that humans exhibit on an image-by-image basis. I will argue this has important implications for thinking about appearance and vision more broadly.
Optics coverage
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