Systems & Computational Neuroscience Down Under (SCiNDU) 2015

Program:

Program book

Information for poster presenters: Poster boards are approximately 1.2m wide by 1.2m high. Within these limits both landscape and portrait formatting are acceptable.

Speakers include:

• Ehsan Arabzadeh (ANU)
• Mark Bear (MIT)
• Michael Breakspear (QIMR)
• Allen Cheung (QBI)
• Yang Dan (UC Berkeley)
• Peter Dayan (UCL)
• Marta Garrido (QBI/CAI)
• Geoffrey Goodhill (QBI)
• Zach Mainen (Champalimaud)
• Jason Mattingley (QBI)
• Linda Richards (QBI)
• Peter Robinson (Sydney)
• Marcello Rosa (Monash)
• Pankaj Sah (QBI)
• Mandyam Srinivasan (QBI)
• Greg Stuart (ANU)
• Stephen Williams (QBI)
• Li Zhaoping (UCL)

On December 15th the conference will be preceded by the following tutorials:

• Peter Dayan: Neural reinforcement learning. In this tutorial we will examine ways that we and other animals make predictions and choose actions in the light of rewards and punishments. This area binds computational notions from control theory and statistics together with the psychology of conditioning, and the neuroscience of decision-making. Dysfunctions of various sorts underpin a wealth of infelicities in choice and, in more extreme cases, psychiatric disease. We will cover: classical topics in (i) prediction learning, Pavlovian conditioning and dopaminergic neuromodulation; (ii) action learning, instrumental conditioning and the striatum and prefrontal cortex; and (iii) more modern concerns of model-based (goal-directed) and model-free (habitual) control; the vigour of responding, and Pavlovian-instrumental competition.
• Li Zhaoping: Vision, efficient coding and salience. I will first talk about efficient coding by the early visual system. This will cover material on: (1) motivation and formulation of the efficient coding principle, (2) application of this principle to understanding early visual receptive fields, e.g., spatial coding, stereo coding, and color coding. The last part will be an introduction to visual attention with an emphasis on visual saliency. The tutorial will be largely based on the computational vision textbook www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Zhaoping.Li/VisionBook.html

Systems & Computational Neuroscience Down Under Conference and Tutorial Registrations

• Student Registration: $175
• Full Registration: $300

Additional cost for Tutorials: $50

Registrations for Systems & Computational Neuroscience Down Under are now open - https://payments.uq.edu.au/OneStopWeb/aspx/tranform.aspx?TRAN-TYPE=W01QBI03

Registration fee includes morning and afternoon teas, lunches, and the conference dinner on Wednesday.

Abstract submission

Abstract submissions are now closed.

Accomodation

Emmanuel College, a residential college of the University of Queensland, has rooms available 15th–17th December 2015. For more information click here.

Contact

Please direct all enquiries about SCiNDU to Geoff Goodhill - g.goodhill@uq.edu.au.