AO Jaunsen

CS Kochanek

D Crampton

D Maoz

E Turner

F Hartwick

H Yee

J Surdej

JF Claeskens

L Wisotski

M Fukugita

N Jackson

P Magain

R Weymann

S Refsdal

Neural Systems & Circuits

English

PubMed

Mark H Histed

Jonathan W Pillow

Crossref

The 8th annual computational and systemsneuroscience (Cosyne) meetingHisted and PillowHisted and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8 (20 April 2011)MEETING REPORT Open AccessThe 8th annual computational and systemsneuroscience (Cosyne) meetingMark H Histed1* and Jonathan W Pillow2OverviewThe 8th annual Computational and Systems Neu-roscience meeting (Cosyne) was held February 24-27,2011 in Salt Lake City, Utah (abstracts are freely avail-able online: http://www.cosyne.org/c/index.php?title=Co-syne2011_Program). Cosyne brings togetherexperimental and theoretical approaches to systems neu-roscience, with the goal of understanding neurons,neural assemblies, and the perceptual, cognitive andbehavioral functions they mediate.The range of questions available to systems and com-putational neuroscience has grown substantially inrecent years, with both theoretical and experimentalapproaches driven by the increasing availability of dataabout neural circuits and systems. The Cosyne meetinghas reflected this growth, nearly doubling in size sincethe first meeting in 2004, to a new record of nearly 600attendees this year. It remains single-track, which allowsdiscussions of presentations to drive scientific interac-tion between attendees with diverse backgrounds. Postersessions take place each evening, which provide a forumfor intense scientific conversations that frequently spillout into more informal settings late at night. The meet-ing is followed by two days of workshops, held at theSnowbird ski resort, which feature more specializedtalks and interactive discussions on a wide collection oftopics, this year ranging from consciousness and com-pressed sensing to dynamics, learning, and perception.We observed a few major emerging themes. The focuson neural circuits is clear; many investigators are usingdetailed knowledge of anatomy, including cell identityand network connectivity, to understand neural activityand function. Several model systems for studying cir-cuits received major focus, including the fly, zebrafish,rat, and mouse. An important strength of these systemsis the ability to manipulate circuits genetically, and stu-dies with genetic components generated significantenthusiasm. A principal question remains how neuralactivity relates to behavior, with the number of studiesin the above model systems increasing, alongside contin-ued behavioral work in humans and non-human pri-mates. Functional coupling between neurons is a keytopic of interest; many presentations addressed methodsand theories for understanding the impact of couplingon computation and network function, and we predictthese efforts will only grow in future years. Questions ofcoupling in time, such as oscillatory activity, continuedto attract considerable attention. The interaction of exci-tatory and inhibitory influences has implications formany neural circuits, and a diverse set of theoretical stu-dies explored the implications of the ‘balanced’ state forcomputation and information transmission. Compara-tively little experimental data on inhibitory and excita-tory interactions exists and we predict there will be anupswing of experiments studying these dynamics in thenext few years. Bayesian statistical theories continued toplay a major role, both as methods for analyzing neuraldata and as theories for optimal information processingin perceptual and motor tasks. Finally, sensory systemshave historically been strongly represented in systemsand computational neuroscience. While this continued,there was broadening interest in motor systems and therepresentations and computations underlying move-ment. The topics covered by submitted abstracts weresummarized nicely in a single slide (Figure 1) presentedby Anne Churchland (Cold Spring Harbor), co-chair ofthe organizing committee.Below we highlight a few presentations of specialinterest. We have made an effort to sample broadly, butCosyne appeals to a large audience across several disci-plines, and we are limited by space and a residual slanttowards our own interests and interactions at the meet-ing. We apologize to those presenters whose contribu-tions we do not have space to mention, but we areexcited about the broad extent of new work weobserved.* Correspondence: mark_histed@hms.harvard.edu1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USAFull list of author information is available at the end of the articleHisted and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8© 2011 Histed and Pillow; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Neural activity and perceptionStanislas Dehaene (INSERM/CEA) gave a wide-rangingsummary of his research on how humans perceive andprocess numerosity, citing behavioral studies of infantsand diverse human societies, and connecting that toneural findings in macaques. Jonathan Victor, D. Then-gone, and M. Conte (Weill Cornell Medical College)presented a novel approach for characterizing the per-ceptual salience of low and high-order statistics in nat-ural images using an innovative method forparameterizing textures; their findings suggested thatimage statistics interact perceptually according to anapproximately Euclidean distance function. Wilson Geis-ler (UT Austin) showed another method for exploitinghigher-order statistical properties of natural imagesusing local measurements from a very large collection ofimages. These statistics were then used to derive Baye-sian solutions to a variety of low-level vision problems.Saskia de Vries and T. Clandinin (Stanford) identified agroup of Drosophila visual neurons that detect objectson a collision course with the fly; inactivating these pre-vents the animal from moving to avoid a collision.Circuits affecting behavioral computationsTirin Moore (Stanford) described new work linking thedopamine circuits of the frontal cortex of the macaqueboth to activity of visual neurons and to behavioralresponses. David Anderson (Caltech) described beautifulwork dissecting circuits in the ventromedial hypothala-mus that underlie aggression in the mouse. Inducingspiking activity in a small but specific population ofneurons in the amygdala produces a complex, sustainedattacking behavior in which male mice are induced toattack females, a rare event in their normal behavior.Franz Weber, C. Machens, and A. Borst (MPI of Neuro-biology) presented an elegant application of the general-ized linear model (GLM) to functional coupling betweentwo identified fly neurons (H1 and Vi) implicated in theprocessing of visual motion. Their analyses revealed aunidirectional coupling from H1 to Vi, tuned to produceoptimally informative representations in Vi. Finally,Surya Ganguli (UCSF) and R. Hahnloser showed thatlocal, Hebbian learning rules can explain rapid learningof complex sequences by neural circuits, a novel para-digm for sequence learning that poses a significant theo-retical challenge to reinforcement learning models. Therange of this work highlights the interest in couplingbetween neurons; we believe a major goal for the field isto determine which behaviors rely on a small number ofneurons, and which are more sensitive to coupling dueto the dynamic interaction of many neurons or multiplecircuits.Information processing in neural assembliesE.J. Chichilnisky (Salk) reviewed his work identifying thefunctional connectivity between individual cones andganglion cells in the primate retina and computationalmethods to infer bipolar cell connectivity. Alison Barth(Carnegie-Mellon) discussed a series of studies on sub-sets of highly-active neurons in the mouse cerebral cor-tex and how they might affect the computationsperformed there. Murray Sherman (Univ. of Chicago)Figure 1 Word cloud of abstract keywords at Cosyne 2011. In this diagram, word size reflects rate of incidence of the word in this year’sabstracts. (Created by Eero Simoncelli, NYU, using the software at http://wordle.net)Histed and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8Page 2 of 3presented an alternative to the usual view that represen-tations are constructed sequentially (for example, firstby the sensory thalamus, then primary, and then sec-ondary sensory cortex and so on). He outlined how sub-cortical regions, including the thalamus, might supportmore parallel or simultaneous processing. Elad Ganmor,R. Segev, and E. Schneidman (Weizmann Inst.)described a novel approach for capturing the joint activ-ity of very large populations of neurons using sparse,low-order interaction networks. Brice Bathellier and S.Rumpel (IMP Vienna) used two-photon calcium imagingin mouse auditory cortex to show that neural subpopu-lations can combine to represent a large number ofdiverse sounds and also predict performance in a sounddiscrimination task. Rubén Moreno-Bote and A. Pouget(Rochester) used an analysis of spiking neural networksto argue that decorrelation does not affect the amountof information available to downstream populations,thus calling into question a central dogma of populationcoding.Understanding network structureTony Zador (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) discusseda new method for solving a major challenge facing thefield - determining which neurons are connected toeach other. The method exploits the tremendousadvances in DNA sequencing technology. It uses shortoligonucleotides to uniquely tag neurons, and viralmachinery to transport the tags across synapses wherethey are identified via sequencing. Ian Ellwood and V.Sohal (UCSF) used both experiments and models toshow how dopaminergic inputs can strongly modulatecells’ firing through intertwined effects on calcium,potassium, and sodium channels. Sandra Kuhlman, E.Tring, and J. Trachtenberg (UCLA) showed that mousevisual inhibitory neurons acquire broader visual tuningduring development, though excitatory neurons sharpentheir tuning as a result of activity. John Cunningham(Cambridge), M. Churchland, M. Kaufman and K. She-noy presented ‘jPCA’, a method for reducing the dimen-sion of large neural datasets by looking for rotational oroscillatory dynamics. Mark Churchland, J. Cunningham,M. Kaufman, S. Ryu and K. Shenoy (Stanford) showedan application of this method to unit recordings frommacaque motor cortex and argued that slow (1-3 Hz)network oscillations seem to be an important basis formotor control.The field of computational and systems neuroscienceis advancing quickly, driven both by innovation inexperimental approaches and simultaneous developmentof theoretical ideas to understand these data. Thegrowth and energy of the Cosyne meeting clearly reflectboth trends.AcknowledgementsWe thank A. Churchland and E. Simoncelli for providing Figure 1, D. Soudanfor attendance statistics, and A. Churchland, M. Bethge, I. Park, T. Vogels, andR. Wilson for feedback on noteworthy presentations.Author details1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.2Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, Center for PerceptualSystems, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin USA.Competing interests statementThe authors declare they have no competing financial interests. JWP hascollaborated with E.J. Chichilnisky.Received: 5 April 2011 Accepted: 20 April 2011 Published: 20 April 2011doi:10.1186/2042-1001-1-8Cite this article as: Histed and Pillow: The 8th annual computational andsystems neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting. Neural Systems & Circuits 20111:8.Submit your next manuscript to BioMed Centraland take full advantage of: • Convenient online submission• Thorough peer review• No space constraints or color figure charges• Immediate publication on acceptance• Inclusion in PubMed, CAS, Scopus and Google Scholar• Research which is freely available for redistributionSubmit your manuscript at www.biomedcentral.com/submitHisted and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8Page 3 of 3

The 8thannual computational and systems neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting

The search for multiply imaged quasars among highly luminous quasars (HLQs) is a very good strategy to determine the fundamental parameters of the Universe. We report on the present observational status of a combined sample of HLQs, including new observations obtained with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) and at ESO. This combined sample of HLQs now contains 1178 distinct HLQs. A complete list of the total sample will be soon made available, through a World-Wide-Web page. Preliminary maximum likelihood results are also presented, using a simple statistical model to constrain the values of galactic parameters, of the number counts of QSOs, and of the cosmological constant.</jats:p

J.-F. Claeskens

A.O. Jaunsen

J. Surdej

Symposium - International Astronomical Union

Gravitational Lenses Among Highly Luminous Quasars: Large Optical Surveys

A. O. Jaunsen

Gravitational Lenses among Highly Luminous Quasars: Large Optical Surveys

Springer - Publisher Connector

The 8th annual computational and systems neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting

The 8th annual computational and systems
neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting
Histed and Pillow
Histed and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8
http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8 (20 April 2011)
MEETING REPORT Open Access
The 8th annual computational and systems
neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting
Mark H Histed1* and Jonathan W Pillow2
Overview
The 8th annual Computational and Systems Neu-
roscience meeting (Cosyne) was held February 24-27,
2011 in Salt Lake City, Utah (abstracts are freely avail-
able online: http://www.cosyne.org/c/index.php?title=Co-
syne2011_Program). Cosyne brings together
experimental and theoretical approaches to systems neu-
roscience, with the goal of understanding neurons,
neural assemblies, and the perceptual, cognitive and
behavioral functions they mediate.
The range of questions available to systems and com-
putational neuroscience has grown substantially in
recent years, with both theoretical and experimental
approaches driven by the increasing availability of data
about neural circuits and systems. The Cosyne meeting
has reflected this growth, nearly doubling in size since
the first meeting in 2004, to a new record of nearly 600
attendees this year. It remains single-track, which allows
discussions of presentations to drive scientific interac-
tion between attendees with diverse backgrounds. Poster
sessions take place each evening, which provide a forum
for intense scientific conversations that frequently spill
out into more informal settings late at night. The meet-
ing is followed by two days of workshops, held at the
Snowbird ski resort, which feature more specialized
talks and interactive discussions on a wide collection of
topics, this year ranging from consciousness and com-
pressed sensing to dynamics, learning, and perception.
We observed a few major emerging themes. The focus
on neural circuits is clear; many investigators are using
detailed knowledge of anatomy, including cell identity
and network connectivity, to understand neural activity
and function. Several model systems for studying cir-
cuits received major focus, including the fly, zebrafish,
rat, and mouse. An important strength of these systems
is the ability to manipulate circuits genetically, and stu-
dies with genetic components generated significant
enthusiasm. A principal question remains how neural
activity relates to behavior, with the number of studies
in the above model systems increasing, alongside contin-
ued behavioral work in humans and non-human pri-
mates. Functional coupling between neurons is a key
topic of interest; many presentations addressed methods
and theories for understanding the impact of coupling
on computation and network function, and we predict
these efforts will only grow in future years. Questions of
coupling in time, such as oscillatory activity, continued
to attract considerable attention. The interaction of exci-
tatory and inhibitory influences has implications for
many neural circuits, and a diverse set of theoretical stu-
dies explored the implications of the ‘balanced’ state for
computation and information transmission. Compara-
tively little experimental data on inhibitory and excita-
tory interactions exists and we predict there will be an
upswing of experiments studying these dynamics in the
next few years. Bayesian statistical theories continued to
play a major role, both as methods for analyzing neural
data and as theories for optimal information processing
in perceptual and motor tasks. Finally, sensory systems
have historically been strongly represented in systems
and computational neuroscience. While this continued,
there was broadening interest in motor systems and the
representations and computations underlying move-
ment. The topics covered by submitted abstracts were
summarized nicely in a single slide (Figure 1) presented
by Anne Churchland (Cold Spring Harbor), co-chair of
the organizing committee.
Below we highlight a few presentations of special
interest. We have made an effort to sample broadly, but
Cosyne appeals to a large audience across several disci-
plines, and we are limited by space and a residual slant
towards our own interests and interactions at the meet-
ing. We apologize to those presenters whose contribu-
tions we do not have space to mention, but we are
excited about the broad extent of new work we
observed.* Correspondence: mark_histed@hms.harvard.edu
1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Histed and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8
http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8
© 2011 Histed and Pillow; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Neural activity and perception
Stanislas Dehaene (INSERM/CEA) gave a wide-ranging
summary of his research on how humans perceive and
process numerosity, citing behavioral studies of infants
and diverse human societies, and connecting that to
neural findings in macaques. Jonathan Victor, D. Then-
gone, and M. Conte (Weill Cornell Medical College)
presented a novel approach for characterizing the per-
ceptual salience of low and high-order statistics in nat-
ural images using an innovative method for
parameterizing textures; their findings suggested that
image statistics interact perceptually according to an
approximately Euclidean distance function. Wilson Geis-
ler (UT Austin) showed another method for exploiting
higher-order statistical properties of natural images
using local measurements from a very large collection of
images. These statistics were then used to derive Baye-
sian solutions to a variety of low-level vision problems.
Saskia de Vries and T. Clandinin (Stanford) identified a
group of Drosophila visual neurons that detect objects
on a collision course with the fly; inactivating these pre-
vents the animal from moving to avoid a collision.
Circuits affecting behavioral computations
Tirin Moore (Stanford) described new work linking the
dopamine circuits of the frontal cortex of the macaque
both to activity of visual neurons and to behavioral
responses. David Anderson (Caltech) described beautiful
work dissecting circuits in the ventromedial hypothala-
mus that underlie aggression in the mouse. Inducing
spiking activity in a small but specific population of
neurons in the amygdala produces a complex, sustained
attacking behavior in which male mice are induced to
attack females, a rare event in their normal behavior.
Franz Weber, C. Machens, and A. Borst (MPI of Neuro-
biology) presented an elegant application of the general-
ized linear model (GLM) to functional coupling between
two identified fly neurons (H1 and Vi) implicated in the
processing of visual motion. Their analyses revealed a
unidirectional coupling from H1 to Vi, tuned to produce
optimally informative representations in Vi. Finally,
Surya Ganguli (UCSF) and R. Hahnloser showed that
local, Hebbian learning rules can explain rapid learning
of complex sequences by neural circuits, a novel para-
digm for sequence learning that poses a significant theo-
retical challenge to reinforcement learning models. The
range of this work highlights the interest in coupling
between neurons; we believe a major goal for the field is
to determine which behaviors rely on a small number of
neurons, and which are more sensitive to coupling due
to the dynamic interaction of many neurons or multiple
circuits.
Information processing in neural assemblies
E.J. Chichilnisky (Salk) reviewed his work identifying the
functional connectivity between individual cones and
ganglion cells in the primate retina and computational
methods to infer bipolar cell connectivity. Alison Barth
(Carnegie-Mellon) discussed a series of studies on sub-
sets of highly-active neurons in the mouse cerebral cor-
tex and how they might affect the computations
performed there. Murray Sherman (Univ. of Chicago)
Figure 1 Word cloud of abstract keywords at Cosyne 2011. In this diagram, word size reflects rate of incidence of the word in this year’s
abstracts. (Created by Eero Simoncelli, NYU, using the software at http://wordle.net)
Histed and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8
http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8
Page 2 of 3
presented an alternative to the usual view that represen-
tations are constructed sequentially (for example, first
by the sensory thalamus, then primary, and then sec-
ondary sensory cortex and so on). He outlined how sub-
cortical regions, including the thalamus, might support
more parallel or simultaneous processing. Elad Ganmor,
R. Segev, and E. Schneidman (Weizmann Inst.)
described a novel approach for capturing the joint activ-
ity of very large populations of neurons using sparse,
low-order interaction networks. Brice Bathellier and S.
Rumpel (IMP Vienna) used two-photon calcium imaging
in mouse auditory cortex to show that neural subpopu-
lations can combine to represent a large number of
diverse sounds and also predict performance in a sound
discrimination task. Rubén Moreno-Bote and A. Pouget
(Rochester) used an analysis of spiking neural networks
to argue that decorrelation does not affect the amount
of information available to downstream populations,
thus calling into question a central dogma of population
coding.
Understanding network structure
Tony Zador (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) discussed
a new method for solving a major challenge facing the
field - determining which neurons are connected to
each other. The method exploits the tremendous
advances in DNA sequencing technology. It uses short
oligonucleotides to uniquely tag neurons, and viral
machinery to transport the tags across synapses where
they are identified via sequencing. Ian Ellwood and V.
Sohal (UCSF) used both experiments and models to
show how dopaminergic inputs can strongly modulate
cells’ firing through intertwined effects on calcium,
potassium, and sodium channels. Sandra Kuhlman, E.
Tring, and J. Trachtenberg (UCLA) showed that mouse
visual inhibitory neurons acquire broader visual tuning
during development, though excitatory neurons sharpen
their tuning as a result of activity. John Cunningham
(Cambridge), M. Churchland, M. Kaufman and K. She-
noy presented ‘jPCA’, a method for reducing the dimen-
sion of large neural datasets by looking for rotational or
oscillatory dynamics. Mark Churchland, J. Cunningham,
M. Kaufman, S. Ryu and K. Shenoy (Stanford) showed
an application of this method to unit recordings from
macaque motor cortex and argued that slow (1-3 Hz)
network oscillations seem to be an important basis for
motor control.
The field of computational and systems neuroscience
is advancing quickly, driven both by innovation in
experimental approaches and simultaneous development
of theoretical ideas to understand these data. The
growth and energy of the Cosyne meeting clearly reflect
both trends.
Acknowledgements
We thank A. Churchland and E. Simoncelli for providing Figure 1, D. Soudan
for attendance statistics, and A. Churchland, M. Bethge, I. Park, T. Vogels, and
R. Wilson for feedback on noteworthy presentations.
Author details
1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.
2Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, Center for Perceptual
Systems, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin USA.
Competing interests statement
The authors declare they have no competing financial interests. JWP has
collaborated with E.J. Chichilnisky.
Received: 5 April 2011 Accepted: 20 April 2011 Published: 20 April 2011
doi:10.1186/2042-1001-1-8
Cite this article as: Histed and Pillow: The 8th annual computational and
systems neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting. Neural Systems & Circuits 2011
1:8.
Submit your next manuscript to BioMed Central
and take full advantage of: 
• Convenient online submission
• Thorough peer review
• No space constraints or color figure charges
• Immediate publication on acceptance
• Inclusion in PubMed, CAS, Scopus and Google Scholar
• Research which is freely available for redistribution
Submit your manuscript at 
www.biomedcentral.com/submit
Histed and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8
http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8
Page 3 of 3


Claeskens, Jean-François

Jaunsen, A. O.

Surdej, Jean

Open Repository and Bibliography - Liège

Histed, Mark

Pillow, Jonathan W

Harvard University - DASH

 The 8th Annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience(Cosyne) Meeting  (Article begins on next page)The Harvard community has made this article openly available.Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters.Citation Histed, Mark H., and Jonathan W. Pillow. 2011. The 8th annualComputational and Systems Neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting.Neural Systems & Circuits 1:8.Published Version doi://10.1186/2042-1001-1-8Accessed February 19, 2015 9:30:14 AM ESTCitable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10265375Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASHrepository, and is made available under the terms and conditionsapplicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth athttp://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAAThe 8th annual computational and systemsneuroscience (Cosyne) meetingHisted and PillowHisted and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8 (20 April 2011)MEETING REPORT Open AccessThe 8th annual computational and systemsneuroscience (Cosyne) meetingMark H Histed1* and Jonathan W Pillow2OverviewThe 8th annual Computational and Systems Neu-roscience meeting (Cosyne) was held February 24-27,2011 in Salt Lake City, Utah (abstracts are freely avail-able online: http://www.cosyne.org/c/index.php?title=Co-syne2011_Program). Cosyne brings togetherexperimental and theoretical approaches to systems neu-roscience, with the goal of understanding neurons,neural assemblies, and the perceptual, cognitive andbehavioral functions they mediate.The range of questions available to systems and com-putational neuroscience has grown substantially inrecent years, with both theoretical and experimentalapproaches driven by the increasing availability of dataabout neural circuits and systems. The Cosyne meetinghas reflected this growth, nearly doubling in size sincethe first meeting in 2004, to a new record of nearly 600attendees this year. It remains single-track, which allowsdiscussions of presentations to drive scientific interac-tion between attendees with diverse backgrounds. Postersessions take place each evening, which provide a forumfor intense scientific conversations that frequently spillout into more informal settings late at night. The meet-ing is followed by two days of workshops, held at theSnowbird ski resort, which feature more specializedtalks and interactive discussions on a wide collection oftopics, this year ranging from consciousness and com-pressed sensing to dynamics, learning, and perception.We observed a few major emerging themes. The focuson neural circuits is clear; many investigators are usingdetailed knowledge of anatomy, including cell identityand network connectivity, to understand neural activityand function. Several model systems for studying cir-cuits received major focus, including the fly, zebrafish,rat, and mouse. An important strength of these systemsis the ability to manipulate circuits genetically, and stu-dies with genetic components generated significantenthusiasm. A principal question remains how neuralactivity relates to behavior, with the number of studiesin the above model systems increasing, alongside contin-ued behavioral work in humans and non-human pri-mates. Functional coupling between neurons is a keytopic of interest; many presentations addressed methodsand theories for understanding the impact of couplingon computation and network function, and we predictthese efforts will only grow in future years. Questions ofcoupling in time, such as oscillatory activity, continuedto attract considerable attention. The interaction of exci-tatory and inhibitory influences has implications formany neural circuits, and a diverse set of theoretical stu-dies explored the implications of the ‘balanced’ state forcomputation and information transmission. Compara-tively little experimental data on inhibitory and excita-tory interactions exists and we predict there will be anupswing of experiments studying these dynamics in thenext few years. Bayesian statistical theories continued toplay a major role, both as methods for analyzing neuraldata and as theories for optimal information processingin perceptual and motor tasks. Finally, sensory systemshave historically been strongly represented in systemsand computational neuroscience. While this continued,there was broadening interest in motor systems and therepresentations and computations underlying move-ment. The topics covered by submitted abstracts weresummarized nicely in a single slide (Figure 1) presentedby Anne Churchland (Cold Spring Harbor), co-chair ofthe organizing committee.Below we highlight a few presentations of specialinterest. We have made an effort to sample broadly, butCosyne appeals to a large audience across several disci-plines, and we are limited by space and a residual slanttowards our own interests and interactions at the meet-ing. We apologize to those presenters whose contribu-tions we do not have space to mention, but we areexcited about the broad extent of new work weobserved. * Correspondence: mark_histed@hms.harvard.edu1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USAFull list of author information is available at the end of the articleHisted and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8© 2011 Histed and Pillow; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Neural activity and perceptionStanislas Dehaene (INSERM/CEA) gave a wide-rangingsummary of his research on how humans perceive andprocess numerosity, citing behavioral studies of infantsand diverse human societies, and connecting that toneural findings in macaques. Jonathan Victor, D. Then-gone, and M. Conte (Weill Cornell Medical College)presented a novel approach for characterizing the per-ceptual salience of low and high-order statistics in nat-ural images using an innovative method forparameterizing textures; their findings suggested thatimage statistics interact perceptually according to anapproximately Euclidean distance function. Wilson Geis-ler (UT Austin) showed another method for exploitinghigher-order statistical properties of natural imagesusing local measurements from a very large collection ofimages. These statistics were then used to derive Baye-sian solutions to a variety of low-level vision problems.Saskia de Vries and T. Clandinin (Stanford) identified agroup of Drosophila visual neurons that detect objectson a collision course with the fly; inactivating these pre-vents the animal from moving to avoid a collision.Circuits affecting behavioral computationsTirin Moore (Stanford) described new work linking thedopamine circuits of the frontal cortex of the macaqueboth to activity of visual neurons and to behavioralresponses. David Anderson (Caltech) described beautifulwork dissecting circuits in the ventromedial hypothala-mus that underlie aggression in the mouse. Inducingspiking activity in a small but specific population ofneurons in the amygdala produces a complex, sustainedattacking behavior in which male mice are induced toattack females, a rare event in their normal behavior.Franz Weber, C. Machens, and A. Borst (MPI of Neuro-biology) presented an elegant application of the general-ized linear model (GLM) to functional coupling betweentwo identified fly neurons (H1 and Vi) implicated in theprocessing of visual motion. Their analyses revealed aunidirectional coupling from H1 to Vi, tuned to produceoptimally informative representations in Vi. Finally,Surya Ganguli (UCSF) and R. Hahnloser showed thatlocal, Hebbian learning rules can explain rapid learningof complex sequences by neural circuits, a novel para-digm for sequence learning that poses a significant theo-retical challenge to reinforcement learning models. Therange of this work highlights the interest in couplingbetween neurons; we believe a major goal for the field isto determine which behaviors rely on a small number ofneurons, and which are more sensitive to coupling dueto the dynamic interaction of many neurons or multiplecircuits.Information processing in neural assembliesE.J. Chichilnisky (Salk) reviewed his work identifying thefunctional connectivity between individual cones andganglion cells in the primate retina and computationalmethods to infer bipolar cell connectivity. Alison Barth(Carnegie-Mellon) discussed a series of studies on sub-sets of highly-active neurons in the mouse cerebral cor-tex and how they might affect the computationsperformed there. Murray Sherman (Univ. of Chicago)Figure 1 Word cloud of abstract keywords at Cosyne 2011. In this diagram, word size reflects rate of incidence of the word in this year’sabstracts. (Created by Eero Simoncelli, NYU, using the software at http://wordle.net)Histed and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8Page 2 of 3presented an alternative to the usual view that represen-tations are constructed sequentially (for example, firstby the sensory thalamus, then primary, and then sec-ondary sensory cortex and so on). He outlined how sub-cortical regions, including the thalamus, might supportmore parallel or simultaneous processing. Elad Ganmor,R. Segev, and E. Schneidman (Weizmann Inst.)described a novel approach for capturing the joint activ-ity of very large populations of neurons using sparse,low-order interaction networks. Brice Bathellier and S.Rumpel (IMP Vienna) used two-photon calcium imagingin mouse auditory cortex to show that neural subpopu-lations can combine to represent a large number ofdiverse sounds and also predict performance in a sounddiscrimination task. Rubén Moreno-Bote and A. Pouget(Rochester) used an analysis of spiking neural networksto argue that decorrelation does not affect the amountof information available to downstream populations,thus calling into question a central dogma of populationcoding.Understanding network structureTony Zador (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) discusseda new method for solving a major challenge facing thefield - determining which neurons are connected toeach other. The method exploits the tremendousadvances in DNA sequencing technology. It uses shortoligonucleotides to uniquely tag neurons, and viralmachinery to transport the tags across synapses wherethey are identified via sequencing. Ian Ellwood and V.S o h a l( U C S F )u s e db o t he x p e r i m e n t sa n dm o d e l st oshow how dopaminergic inputs can strongly modulatecells’ firing through intertwined effects on calcium,potassium, and sodium channels. Sandra Kuhlman, E.T r i n g ,a n dJ .T r a c h t e n b e r g( U C L A )s h o w e dt h a tm o u s evisual inhibitory neurons acquire broader visual tuningduring development, though excitatory neurons sharpentheir tuning as a result of activity. John Cunningham(Cambridge), M. Churchland, M. Kaufman and K. She-noy presented ‘jPCA’, a method for reducing the dimen-sion of large neural datasets by looking for rotational oroscillatory dynamics. Mark Churchland, J. Cunningham,M. Kaufman, S. Ryu and K. Shenoy (Stanford) showedan application of this method to unit recordings frommacaque motor cortex and argued that slow (1-3 Hz)network oscillations seem to be an important basis formotor control.The field of computational and systems neuroscienceis advancing quickly, driven both by innovation inexperimental approaches and simultaneous developmentof theoretical ideas to understand these data. Thegrowth and energy of the Cosyne meeting clearly reflectboth trends.AcknowledgementsWe thank A. Churchland and E. Simoncelli for providing Figure 1, D. Soudanfor attendance statistics, and A. Churchland, M. Bethge, I. Park, T. Vogels, andR. Wilson for feedback on noteworthy presentations.Author details1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.2Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, Center for PerceptualSystems, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin USA.Competing interests statementThe authors declare they have no competing financial interests. JWP hascollaborated with E.J. Chichilnisky.Received: 5 April 2011 Accepted: 20 April 2011 Published: 20 April 2011doi:10.1186/2042-1001-1-8Cite this article as: Histed and Pillow: The 8th annual computational andsystems neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting. Neural Systems & Circuits 20111:8.Submit your next manuscript to BioMed Centraland take full advantage of: • Convenient online submission• Thorough peer review• No space constraints or color ﬁgure charges• Immediate publication on acceptance• Inclusion in PubMed, CAS, Scopus and Google Scholar• Research which is freely available for redistributionSubmit your manuscript at www.biomedcentral.com/submitHisted and Pillow Neural Systems & Circuits 2011, 1:8http://www.neuralsystemsandcircuits.com/content/1/1/8Page 3 of 3

The 8th Annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (Cosyne) Meeting

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The 8th annual computational and systems neuroscience (Cosyne) meeting

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