Cosyne 2007 Workshops
February 26-27, 2007
The Canyons, Utah
Workshop Title
Emerging information-theoretic measures and methods in neuroscience
Organizer(s)
Michael Gastpar (UC Berkeley): gastpar@eecs.berkeley.edu
Jonathan Victor (Cornell): jdvicto@med.cornell.edu
Abstract
Direct application of information-theoretic tools to laboratory measurements of stimulus-response relationships have resulted in a number of important insights. However, these approaches often require very large amounts of data (especially for multineuronal analyses), and are thus of limited practicality in vertebrate systems, especially the central nervous system. Moreover, there are sound theoretical reasons for using an information-theoretic approach even when the neurons under study do not behave "optimally."
In extension and response to these issues, over the past few years, several research groups have developed a second generation of information-theoretic tools. The goal of the proposed workshop is to provide an in-depth snapshot of the status of these investigations in some of their most exciting aspects, including:
1. Notions of optimality of information representations in neurons
2. Correlation and information measures of redundancy in populations of neurons and/or the implications of limited data
3. Refined methods and approaches to estimate mutual information from measurement data, with a particular focus on populations of neurons
4. Use of information-theoretic tools as a means to characterize the nature of the neural code, rather than the quantity of information carried
Speakers
| Toby Berger (Cornell/U. Virginia) | Energy-efficient recursive estimation by variable-threshold neurons |
| Michael Berry (Princeton University) | Correlated Neural Populations in the Retina |
| Dmitri Chklovskii (Cold Spring Harbor) | Optimal Information Storage in Noisy Synapses under Resource Constraints |
| Adrienne Fairhall (U. Washington) | Model evaluation using information |
| David Field (Cornell) | Measuring the information content and dimensionality of complex signals: An example of natural scenes and proximity distributions |
| Michael Gastpar (UC Berkeley) | Scaling Information Measures for Population Codes |
| William Levy (U. Virginia) | The interaction between timeliness and information in determining the energetic cost of the action potential of unmyelinated nerves. |
| Liam Paninski (Columbia University) | Model-based methods for stimulus decoding, information estimation, and information-theoretic optimal stimulus design |
| Jonathan Pillow (University College London) | Neural characterization using an information-theoretic generalization of spike-triggered average and covariance analysis |
| Jonathon Shlens (Salk Institute) | Exploring the network structure of primate retina using maximum entropy methods |
| Naftali Tishby (The Hebrew University) | Optimal adaptation and predictive information |
| Jonathan Victor (Cornell) | Why it is difficult to calculate information, and why there are so many approaches |
