This project will attempt the first true "reverse engineering" of the behavior of cells from the cerebral cortex studied outside the brain, grown on a special chip which allows dense read-ins and read-outs from a network of these cells. The cerebral cortex is the largest part of the human brain (and of many other mammalian brains). Reverse engineering, if successful, would give us the first understanding of how these cells work as a functional, engineering system at the circuit level. Because of its uniqueness and novelty, there will be serious risks in this work. One of the collaborators will be comparing the behavior of these networks of cells against his new model of neurons, the liquid state model (LSM). Another will be comparing the cells and the LSM against general-purpose learning challenges which have been addressed using artificial neural networks, for real-world engineering tasks such as prediction and control and classification and so on. The crossdisciplinary and international collaborations play a crucial role in making this new direction for research possible.
