This award supports an international meeting on the properties of complex natural environmental stimuli, and the encoding and processing of these stimuli by biological systems. The theme of the meeting is highly interdisciplinary, and the organizers seek to draw attendees from a variety of backgrounds to promote cross-fertilization, including systems and cognitive neuroscience, perceptual psychology, statistics, signal processing, and computer science.
The meeting has three fundamental components that are of central importance to the development of robust machine intelligence: the development of sophisticated (i.e., non-Gaussian) source models; identification, codification, and exploitation of principles for biological processing of diverse and complex sensory patterns; and neural decoding-- the extraction of information about the sensory world directly from the spiking activity of single cells or populations of cells. This topic has direct application to brain-computer interfaces and robotic control of movement. The meeting will help fulfill the need to educate both students and current investigators about the techniques, methodologies, and types of results emerging from this field.
