Computation and Neural Systems: Difference between revisions

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In the fall of 1986, [[John Hopfield]] championed forming an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program to give birth to a scholarly community studying questions arising at the interface between neurobiology and electrical engineering, computer science and physics. It was called ''Computation and Neural Systems'' (CNS). The unifying theme of the program was the relationship between the physical structure of a computational system (physical or biological hardware), the dynamics of its operation and the computational problems that it can efficiently solve. The creation of this multidisciplinary program stems largely from progress on several previously unrelated fronts: the analysis of complex neural systems at both the single-cell and the network levels

<ref>D.J. Felleman, D.C. Van Essen. ''Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex''. Cerebral Cortex, 1 (1) (1991)</ref>

using a variety of techniques (in particular, [[patch clamp]] recordings, intracellular and extra-cellular single and multi-unit [[electrophysiology]] in the awake animal and functional brain imaging techniques, such as [[functional magnetic resonance imaging]] (fMRI)), the theoretical analysis of nervous structures ([[computational neuroscience]]) and the modeling of artificial [[neural networks]] for engineering purposes.<ref name=HopfieldNets/> The program started out with a small number of existing faculty in the various divisions. Amongst the early founding faculty were [[Carver Mead]], [[John Hopfield]], [https://web.archive.org/web/20111002093325/http://neuroscience.wustl.edu/research/faculty.php?id=11 David van Essen], Geoffrey Fox, [[James M. Bower|James Bower]], Mark Konishi, John Allman, [[Ed Posner]] and [[Demetri Psaltis]]. In that year, the first external professor, [[Christof Koch]], was hired.

Since 1990, about 110 graduate students have been awarded a PhD in CNS and 14 a MS in CNS. About two-thirds of CNS graduates pursued an academic career, with the remaining CNS graduates founding and/or joining start-up companies. Over this time, the average duration of PhD has been 5.6 years.

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* Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for Computing, in 1984.

* [[Neural Information Processing Systems]] (NIPS) in 1987.

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110723215254/http://www.mbl.edu/education/courses/special_topics/mcn.html Methods in Computational Neuroscience at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole], in 1988.

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20140619020927/http://www.ine-web.org:80/index.php The Telluride Summer School in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering], in 1993.

== Related academic programs ==