This proposal seeks support for travel awards and registration support to US students and post-docs to attend the AREADNE 2014 Research in Encoding and Decoding of Neural Ensembles conference to be held June 26-29, 2014, at the Nomikos Conference Centre, in Santorini, Greece. This will be the fifth conference in the biennial AREADNE series that provides opportunities for US students and scientists studying neural ensembles to be informed on the latest advances in the field, interact with their international peers and develop long-term professional relationships. The primary goals of the AREADNE conference include: 1. To provide an open, interactive forum to foster discussion of cutting-edge results from scientific leaders in the field of neural ensembles. 2. To enable the development of lasting professional relationships by creating an informal environment that predisposes attendees to free interaction. 3. To create a scientific venue that offers US investigators exposure to their European and Eastern Mediterranean peers in the field. Additionally, the conference will provide a forum to foster interactions of established investigators with students, post-docs and other young scientists in the field.
Encoding and decoding of neural ensembles is a developing field in neuroscience. The biennial AREADNE conference meets an important need in this field, as there is no other similar conference that provides a tight, focused, and intensive presentation of the subject and topics. Single-track morning and evening sessions with invited speakers and evening poster presentations will be used to disseminate the latest advances in the field and promote interactions among the attendees. Planned sessions include (1) early visual systems, (2) decision making, (3) patterns and network synchronization, (4) connectomics, (5) learning and plasticity, (6) molecular mechanisms, and (7) visuo-motor integration. For each theme, presentations will emphasize how sensory, cognitive, and motor states are encoded in the interaction of multiple neurons and in turn how these states can be reconstructed from neuronal ensembles. After the meeting, proceedings will be published on the web for wide dissemination to the scientific community.
