Fall 2009

October 6 Brain Dynamics: From Neural Fields to Neural Avalanches

Michael Buice

National Institutes of Health

Abstract:
Population rate or activity equations are the foundation of a common approach to modeling for neural networks and have been used to analyze various neural phenomena from EEG rhythms to visual hallucinations. However, these equations only provide mean field dynamics for the firing rate or activity of neurons within a network given some connectivity. The shortcoming of these equations is that they take into account only the average firing rate while leaving out higher order statistics like correlations between firing. This talk will describe how techniques from non-equilibrium statistical physics have been adapted in order to understand the statistics of neural systems. In particular, I will describe a path integral formulation of the stochastic neural model and develop a "semi-classical" expansion from this. In addition, renormalization group arguments can be made to make a connection to the cortical slice experiments of so-called "neural avalanches". This approach brings together different points of view on neural modeling.

November 10 Title Recent Progress in Additive Prime Number Theory

Terence Tao 2009 Moursund Lectures, 129 MacKenzie

UCLA

November 17 The Birth of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

Ray Frey

Department of Physics
Univerisy of Oregon

November 24 Computational Paleontology

Kent Stevens

Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Oregon

December 1 Title TBA

Alan Rempel

Department of Geological Sciences
University of Oregon

Title TBA