Topic: adaptation

This EMBO workshop brings experimental and computational researchers together around molecular mechanisms of adaptation, evolutionary dynamics, microbial communities, symbiosis, biodiversity, and cell-environment interactions.

Tinbergen encouraged ethologists to address animal behaviour by answering four questions, covering physiology, adaptation, phylogeny, and development. This broad approach has implications for neuroscience and psychology, yet, questions about phylogeny are rarely considered in these fields. Here I describe how phylogeny can shed light on our understanding of brain structure and function. Further, I show that we now have or are developing the data and analytical methods necessary to study the natural history of the human mind.

The research in my lab focuses on sensory signal processing, particularly in cases where sensory systems perform at or near the limits imposed by physics. Photon counting in the visual system is a beautiful example. At its peak sensitivity, the performance of the visual system is limited largely by the division of light into discrete photons. This observation has several implications for phototransduction and signal processing in the retina: rod photoreceptors must transduce single photon absorptions with high fidelity, single photon signals in photoreceptors, which are only 0.03 – 0.1 mV, mus

In behaving rodents, CA1 pyramidal neurons receive spatially-tuned depolarizing synaptic input while traversing a specific location within an environment called its place. Midbrain dopamine neurons participate in reinforcement learning, and bursts of action potentials riding a depolarizing wave of synaptic input signal rewards and reward expectation. Interestingly, slice electrophysiology in vitro shows that both types of cells exhibit a pronounced reduction in firing rate (adaptation) and even cessation of firing during sustained depolarization. We included a five state Markov model of NaV1.6

Spike-driven adaptation involves intracellular mechanisms that are initiated by neural firing and lead to the subsequent reduction of spiking rate followed by a recovery back to baseline. We report on long (>0.5 second) recovery times from adaptation in a thalamic-like structure in weakly electric fish. This adaptation process is shown via modeling and experiment to encode in a spatially invariant manner the time intervals between event encounters, e.g. with landmarks as the animal learns the location of food. These cells also come in two varieties, ones that care only about the time since the

Climate change is one of our generation's greatest challenges, with increasingly severe consequences on global ecosystems and populations. Machine Learning has the potential to address many important challenges in climate change, from both mitigation (reducing its extent) and adaptation (preparing for unavoidable consequences) aspects. To present the extent of these opportunities, I will describe some of the projects that I am involved in, spanning from generative model to computer vision and natural language processing. There are many opportunities for fundamental innovation in this field, ad

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently shown great promise as an approach to networked system control. Arguably, one of the most difficult and important tasks for which large scale networked system control is applicable is common-pool resource (CPR) management. Crucial CPRs include arable land, fresh water, wetlands, wildlife, fish stock, forests and the atmosphere, of which proper management is related to some of society’s greatest challenges such as food security, inequality and climate change. This talk will consist of three parts. In the first, we will briefly look at clima

How does a circuit of neurons process sensory information? And how are transformations of neural signals altered by changes in synaptic strength? We investigate these questions in the context of the visual system and the lateral line of fish. A distinguishing feature of our approach is the imaging of activity across populations of synapses – the fundamental elements of signal transfer within all brain circuits. A guiding hypothesis is that the plasticity of neurotransmission plays a major part in controlling the input-output relation of sensory circuits, regulating the tuning and sensitivit

Many visual systems can process information in dynamically changing environments. In general, visual perception scales with changes in the visual stimulus, or contrast, irrespective of background illumination. This is achieved by adaptation. However, visual perception is challenged when adaptation is not fast enough to deal with sudden changes in overall illumination, for example when gaze follows a moving object from bright sunlight into a shaded area. We have recently shown that the visual system of the fly found a solution by propagating a corrective luminance-sensitive signal to higher pro