Title: Computational Neuroscience

Speaker: Lakshminarayan “Ram” Srinivasan, MIT Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Harvard Medical School

Location: Building CSRI, Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: Systems engineering is rapidly assuming a prominent role in neuroscience that could unify scientific theories, experimental evidence, and medical development.  In this talk, I focus on the first part of a larger three-part work, where I study the neural representation of targets before reaching movements and the generation of prosthetic control signals through stochastic modeling and estimation.

Part One: I show that temporal and history dependence contributes to the representation of targets in the ensemble spiking activity of neurons in primate dorsal premotor cortex (PMd).  Point process modeling of target representation suggests that local and possibly also distant neural interactions influence the spiking patterns observed in PMd

Part Two: I draw on results from surveillance theory to reconstruct reaching movements from neural activity related to the desired target and the path to that target.   This approach combines movement planning and execution to surpass estimation with either target or path related neural activity alone.

Part Three: I describe the principled design of brain-driven neural prosthetic devices as a filtering problem on interacting discrete and continuous random processes.  This framework subsumes four canonical Bayesian approaches and supports emerging applications to neural prosthetic devices.

CSRI POC: Danny Rintoul, (505) 844-9592