TOWARDS NEOCORTICAL VISION IN SILICON

Bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs is presenting this week at "chalk talk" at UCSD's Institute for Neural Computation. Abstract below:

We are embarking on an exciting journey in our continued and renewed efforts, with the DARPA Neovision2 program, towards reverse engineering the visual system in silicon. I will share the visions and plans of our team that spans the two coasts and the spectrum between neuroscience and neuroengineering. I will also briefly present a scalable approach to
realizing locally dense and globally sparse connectivity in large-scale reconfigurable neuromorphic systems, towards a real-time and low-power silicon model of neocortical vision with over a million neurons and a billion synapses.

INC Chalk Series Winter-Spring 2010:

2/4 Terry Sejnowski: motor cortex dynamics
2/18 Gert Cauwenberghs: Neovision2
3/4 no chalk -- INC/SCCN open house
3/18 Tzyy-Ping Jung: wireless BCI
4/1 TBD
4/15 Howard Poizner: motion capture and brain dynamics
4/29- TBD

Cars and Computers...What Gives?

KPBS, the San Diego NPR station, interviewed computer science professor Ingolf Krueger regarding cars and computers. The name of the segment: "Are Car Electronics Too Complex?"

Ingolf Krueger is involved in a variety of projects at the Jacobs School of Engineering and Calit2. He directs the Service-Oriented Software and Systems Engineering Laboratory. He also directs the Gordon Center for Engineering Leadership at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Wind Turbine Shake Test on TV

KUSI is just one of the local TV stations that covered the earthquake tests of wind turbines. As far as we know, this is the first shake test of wind turbines in which the turbine blades were turning during the test. Below is what KUSI had to say:

UCSD quake-tests wind turbines

Earthquakes and renewable energy aren't usually mentioned in the same conversation, but a team of engineers at UC San Diego wants to know what one would do to the other.

Here is the link to the KUSI story with video.

E-Week is Next Week. Fun Week is Next Week.

E-Week is lots of fun at the Jacobs School. It's starts off with a Monday holiday (genius beginning!) Here is a post with all of last year's E-Week videos.

Tuesday is E-Games: You get to drop squishy items from a huge helium balloon on Warren Mall. In the past, the students have dropped tomatoes, but this year, they are switching things up...so what exactly students will be trying to protect from the 50-foot drop is a mystery (to me at least).

Wednesday: ENSPIRE 450 8th graders come to campus and get a glimpse of life on campus, and life as an engineering student. It's a fun/exciting/wild day. And the number of Jacobs undergrads who come out to volunteer is incredible...hundreds of volunteers...and you can never have too many volunteers when you've got 450 8th graders on your hands.

Thursday: resume workshop and general prep for the big event the following day.

Friday: DECaF A huge, student-organized career fair just for engineering students from the Jacobs School. It's an impressive event.

All the info is on the TESC website:
http://tesc.ucsd.edu/eweek/

Calcium Waves and Alzheimer's Disease

Catching waves in San Diego...it's usually all about the surfers...but not always. Bioengineers are catching calcium waves in the brain cells of rats in order to figure out how the brain works...and maybe get a better idea of what causes Alzheimer's Disease.

Chris MacDonald, a bioengineering PhD student at the Jacobs School, is the guy in the photos above, and one of the first authors on a new paper in the journal ASN Neuro. The researchers describe the calcium waves they caught in the brain cells from rats that were exposted to the infamous amaloid beta peptides (a possible cause of Alzheimer's Disease). Below are related videos. Chris is in the lab of bioengineering professor Gabriel Silva.

I just put up the press release on the Jacobs School site...it is also up on the Bioengineering news site, and it will make its way up on the Institute of Engineering in Medicine site and the UC San Diego news site. The story is also up on EurekAlert.

Below...deep neuroscience...the last part of the press release (full version here):

Deep Neuroscience Questions

By tracking calcium waves in networks of brain cells, researchers can see changes in membrane voltage, which offers insights into how neurons and other brains cells, including astrocytes, communicate. A better understanding of how the brain works from this bottom-up perspective could lead researchers closer to answering some of the deepest questions in neuroscience. Calcium imaging is emerging as the primary method for interrogating the activity of cellular neural networks, explained Silva, whose Cellular Neural Engineering laboratory focuses, in part, on how information flows through networks of brain cells. According to Silva, answering some of the deepest questions in neuroscience—like What are the origins of creativity, logical reasoning, consciousness and emotions?—will require a better understanding of how information is processed by functional networks in the brains of humans and other species.

“We are just getting to the point where the math and engineering methods are starting to be developed to allow one to study brain networks at the scale of individual cells,” said Silva. His lab collaborates with Henry Abarbanel’s group in the Department of Physics at UC San Diego on mathematical modeling of neurophysiological systems and computational neuroscience.
In the ASN NEURO paper, the researchers used calcium imaging to study a purified astrocyte network. Meanwhile, novel complementary techniques, including “two photon optical microscopy” are raising the possibility of experimental tools capable of testing and validating new theories about how the brain functions from the perspective of cellular networks. This technology could also help researchers uncover how individual brain cells behave as signals propagate through a given network. The Silva lab collaborates with Anna Devor’s Neurovascular Imaging Laboratory in the Department of Neuroscience at UC San Diego on experimental cellular imaging and neurophysiology.

Today’s fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) tools are useful for studying the brain, but their spatial resolution is far too course to provide insights at the cellular level. “With fMRI, you have no information on what is happening at the individual circuit and network level,” said Silva. With technologies such as two photon optical microscopy, researchers are aiming to uncover how the brain works in much finer detail.

Mapping Brain Networks is Just the Start

While mapping the activity of cell networks is “a fantastically interesting problem” according to Silva, it is just the beginning. A more difficult problem involves determining how the brain uses that information. “Pushing the envelope of understanding for these types of problems requires breakthroughs in engineering, math and physics. That is the interesting part for us,” said Silva.

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“Amyloid-β directly induces spontaneous calcium transients, delayed intercellular calcium waves, and gliosis in rat cortical astrocytes” by Siu-Kei Chow 1*, Diana Yu 1*, Christopher L. MacDonald 1*, Marius Buibas 1, and Gabriel A. Silva 1,2,3 at1 Department of Bioengineering,2 Department of Ophthalmology,3 Neurosciences Program, University of California, San Diego*These authors contributed equally to this work

This work was supported by funds from the NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) at the NIH (National Institutes of Health)

Warren Mall from Powell Labs

A quiet moment on Warren Mall from the roof of the Powell Labs north building.

Left to Right: Engineering Building 1 (EBU1) which is mostly electrical engineering, Bioengineering and Computer Science & Engineering.

Calit2 Summer Research for Undergrads

If you're an undergrad at the Jacobs School interested in the possibility of getting paid to do research at UCSD this summer, then listen up! There is something called the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Research Scholarship program. (There were 2 info sessions this week...but even if you missed them, there is still time.) Read more here...and the contact info for the program is below:

Participation in the weekly seminars, presentations, and tours as scheduled all count towards the 40-hour work week. The scholarship amount of $3000 will be paid in two installments of $1500 each.

For more inform

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ation on the 2010 program, please contact Samantha Romanin, the program coordinator, at 858.822.1499 or ugradprogram@calit2.net.