Cookies
We use essential cookies to run the site. Analytics cookies are optional and help us improve World Wide. Learn more.
Prof.
University of California, Davis
Showing your local timezone
Schedule
Friday, September 25, 2020
2:00 AM America/New_York
Recording provided by the organiser.
Domain
NeuroscienceHost
NYU Swartz
Duration
70 minutes
Many networks in the brain are sparsely connected, and the brain eliminates synapses during development and learning. How could the brain decide which synapses to prune? In a recurrent network, determining the importance of a synapse between two neurons is a difficult computational problem, depending on the role that both neurons play and on all possible pathways of information flow between them. Noise is ubiquitous in neural systems, and often considered an irritant to be overcome. In the first part of this talk, I will suggest that noise could play a functional role in synaptic pruning, allowing the brain to probe network structure and determine which synapses are redundant. I will introduce a simple, local, unsupervised plasticity rule that either strengthens or prunes synapses using only synaptic weight and the noise-driven covariance of the neighboring neurons. For a subset of linear and rectified-linear networks, this rule provably preserves the spectrum of the original matrix and hence preserves network dynamics even when the fraction of pruned synapses asymptotically approaches 1. The plasticity rule is biologically-plausible and may suggest a new role for noise in neural computation. Time permitting, I will then turn to the problem of extracting structure from neural population data sets using dimensionality reduction methods. I will argue that nonlinear structures naturally arise in neural data and show how these nonlinearities cause linear methods of dimensionality reduction, such as Principal Components Analysis, to fail dramatically in identifying low-dimensional structure.
Rishidev Chaudhuri
Prof.
University of California, Davis
Contact & Resources
neuro
Nervous system function relies on the polarized architecture of neurons, established by directional transport of pre- and postsynaptic cargoes. While delivery of postsynaptic components depends on the
neuro
A combinatorial neural code for long-term motor memory
neuro
The postdoctoral researcher will work on an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of deep learning and comparative politics. The candidate will work in the Human-Centered Machine Learning (HuM
We are looking for highly motivated researchers to join our group in interdisciplinary projects that focus on the development of computational models to understand how linguistic information is repres
The CSNG Lab at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at the Charles University is seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Researcher to join our team to work on a digital twin model of the visual sy
PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Cluster headache (CH), which affects about 1 in 1,000 people, is a severe and debilitating primary headache disorder characterized by repeated attacks occurring in clusters