September 2018 - Comp-neuro - lists.cnsorg.org

Tenure-track faculty position in Computation Neuroscience at Western University, Canada

by Jorn Diedrichsen

Supported by BrainsCAN, a $66M grant from the Canadian government (www.uwo.ca/brainscan<http://www.uwo.ca/brainscan>), Western University is expanding it’s strength in Neuroscience with a new tenure-track faculty position (Assistant or Associate Professor) in Computational Neuroscience. Successful candidates will join the Brain and Mind Institute (www.uwo.ca/bmi<http://www.uwo.ca/bmi>), one of the leading centres in cognitive Neuroscience in Canada, with a full range of ultrahigh field, research-dedicated MRI scanners (3T, 7T, 9.4T) and state-of-the-art laboratories for cognitive, behavioural, and neurophysiological testing in humans, non-human primates and rodents. The academic appointment of the candidate will be, depending on the candidate’s background, in the Department for Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or Computer Science. The deadline for the position in Computational Neuroscience is November 1st: https://brainscan.uwo.ca/work_with_us/vacancies/index.html Jörn Diedrichsen Western Research Chair Brain Mind Institute Department of Computer Science Department of Statistics Email: jdiedric(a)uwo.ca<mailto:jdiedric@uwo.ca> Tel: 1-519-661-2111 x86994

Sept. 29, 2018

Postdoctoral research in theoretical neuroscience

by Brent Doiron

The Doiron group at the University of Pittsburgh is currently seeking up to three postdoctoral fellows to work on cutting edge problems in theoretical neuroscience. Research topics include 1) Large-scale collaboration on modeling diverse inhibitory circuits in mouse V1. The research will be in collaboration with the Columbia theory center (Ken Miller, Larry Abbott, Misha Tsodyks, and Liam Paninski) as well as experimental labs at Berkeley (Adesnik lab, Ji lab) , UCSF (Scanziani lab) and Caltech (Cai lab). 2) Modeling population activity in the visual system and its modulation through top-down cognitive processes. 3) Modeling the formation and stability mechanics of learning in recurrently coupled cortical networks. All projects will involve heavy collaboration with several prominent experimental groups both in Pittsburgh as well as abroad. The positions are 3 year terms (contingent upon satisfactory progress) with competitive salary and benefits packages offered by the University of Pittsburgh. The successful candidate will join the Mathematics department at the University of Pittsburgh and will have strong ties to the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in Pittsburgh (joint between Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University). Candidates should have a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience, mathematics, physics, or engineering and have an excellent track record of scholarship. The University of Pittsburgh is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from under-represented groups. Interested persons should send their CV, a cover letter stating research interests and career goals, and names and contact information of two references to: bdoiron(a)pitt.edu . The competition will remain open until the positions are filled. -- Professor of Mathematics Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition University of Pittsburgh 301 Thackeray Hall Pittsburgh, PA, 15260 www.math.pitt.edu/~bdoiron

Sept. 29, 2018

Faculty position in computational neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh

by Brent Doiron

Dear Computational neuroscience community The Dietrich School at the University of Pittsburgh invites applications for two tenure-track faculty positions at the Assistant Professor level in *Mathematical and Computational Life Sciences *to begin in the fall term of 2019. Successful candidates will be placed in the departments most suitable for their backgrounds and research programs from among the Departments of Mathematics, Biology, Neuroscience, Physics, and Chemistry. We seek outstanding scientists who will enhance and complement our existing strengths and who will collaborate with members of our sizable neuroscience, biology, biophysics, and biochemistry communities. One position is in *Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience. *Candidates working on the following topics are especially encouraged to apply: - Circuits and information flow in neuroscience - Neuronal and population dynamics - Synaptic mechanisms and dynamics - Neuronal membrane properties and ion channel function The other position is in *Mathematics and Theory of Biological Processes*. Candidates working on the following topics are especially encouraged to apply: - Mathematical ecology - Evolutionary theory - Cellular sensing and signal processing - Epigenetic and gene network dynamics The University of Pittsburgh is an active center for interdisciplinary research in the life sciences offering exciting opportunities for collaborations across departments as well as with our highly ranked medical school. The University is currently ranked third in the nation in total NIH funding, and the city of Pittsburgh is often voted “most livable” in the nation. These positions represent part of a vision to grow our community of researchers at the interface of mathematics, physics, chemistry and the life sciences. Successful candidates will have a Ph.D. and should demonstrate substantial research accomplishment and dedication to teaching. They will be expected to establish an extramurally funded research program, train graduate students, and actively participate in undergraduate education. *Review of applications will begin on October 23, 2018, *and will continue until the positions are filled*. *Applicants can apply online at: https://facultysearch.as.pitt.edu/apply/index/MjQy. Candidates should submit (a) a cover letter, (b) a CV, (c) a statement of research accomplishments and future plans, (d) a brief description of teaching interests, (e) a brief description of how your research, teaching or service demonstrates a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and (f) at least three letters of reference (for each reference, you will have the opportunity to input an email address through Interfolio’s Online Application system and a notification will be sent to the designated address with instructions). The positions are pending budgetary approval. The University of Pittsburgh is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and values equality of opportunity, human dignity and diversity. EEO/AA/M/F/Vets/Disabled. Person to Contact: Erika Carpio 139 University Place Room 302 Pittsburgh, PA 15206 412-624-8361 -- Professor of Mathematics Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition University of Pittsburgh 301 Thackeray Hall Pittsburgh, PA, 15260 www.math.pitt.edu/~bdoiron

Sept. 29, 2018

job opening in neural dynamics and control

by Obermayer, Klaus, Prof. Dr.

Dear moderator, can post our job announcement below on the neuroinformatics mailing list? Thank you very much! Best regards Klaus Obermayer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Neural Information Processing Group @ Technische Universität Berlin Research Assistant (PhD Position) in Computational Neuroscience Brain network models: Dynamics and Control Salary grade E13 (TV-L Berliner Hochschulen) Duration: max. 4 years Starting date: January 1st, 2019 Working field: The successful candidate is supposed to work on the analysis and simulation of calibrated whole-brain networks using neuronal mass models and on the design and evaluation of novel control schemes for the stabilization of and the switching between their dynamical states. She/he will be part of the Collaborative Research Center "Control of self-organizing nonlinear systems: Theoretical methods and concepts of application" (https://www.itp.tu-berlin.de/sfb910/ sonderforschungsbereich_910/sonderforschungsbereich_910/) as well as the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin (https://www.bccn-berlin.de/) The candidate is also expected to interact with clinical scientists who are interested in the non-invasive manipulation of the whole-brain dynamics using transcranial current stimulation. Requirements: Successfully completed university degree (Master, Diplom, or equivalent) in Computational Neuroscience, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or related fields; in-depth knowledge in non-linear dynamics and stochastic processes; very good programming and English language skills. How to apply: Please send your application with the usual documents (CV, motivation letter, transcripts of records, certificates, and the names of two persons who can provide recommendation letters) to Prof. Dr. Obermayer, FG Neuronale Informationsverarbeitung, Sekr. MAR 5-6, Marchstr. 23, 10587 Berlin, Germany, or by e-mail to klaus.obermayer(a)tu-berlin.de. For information about the research group see https://www.ni.tu-berlin.de/ Please send copies only. Original documents will not be returned. Aplication deadline: 26. 10. 2018 Reference number: IV-570/18

Sept. 28, 2018

Two PhD positions in computational and cognitive neuroscience

by Alireza Soltani

Two PhD positions are available in the Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab <http://ccnl.dartmouth.edu/> of Alireza Soltani at Dartmouth College. This NIH-funded project aims to uncover circuit-level mechanisms underlying adaptive learning. The project involves computational modeling at different levels (mean-field to spiking networks) as well as analyses of behavioral, electrophysiological, and calcium imaging data in rats during dynamic learning and decision-making tasks. Applicants should have a strong quantitative background (e.g. physics, math, statistics, computational neuroscience, computer science, etc), good programming skills, genuine interest in understanding the brain, and a collaborative attitude. A background in neuroscience is desirable, but not essential. Interested applicants should submit an inquiry to Alireza Soltani (soltani(a)dartmouth.edu <mailto:soltani@darmouth.edu>), and submit their applications to Psychological and Brain Sciences Program <https://pbs.dartmouth.edu/graduate/graduate-admissions>at Dartmouth College. Alireza Soltani, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Dartmouth College, NH Alireza.Soltani(a)Dartmouth.edu <mailto:Alireza.Soltani@Dartmouth.edu> http://ccnl.dartmouth.edu <http://ccnl.dartmouth.edu/> Phone: 603-646-2998 Office: Moore 356

Sept. 28, 2018

New ebook: Neural Information Theory

by James V Stone

This book (published June 2018) is now available in Kindle and pdf formats: Principles of Neural Information Theory: Computational Neuroscience and Metabolic Efficiency by James V Stone. Reviews, synopsis, and table of contents can be found here: http://sebtelpress.com "To understand life, one has to understand not just the flow of energy, but also the flow of information." William Bialek, 2012. regards, Dr James V Stone Honorary Reader, Sheffield University, UK. Web: sebtelpress.com Twitter: @jgvfwstone

Sept. 27, 2018

EEG time-varying networks - paper & code

by Williams, Nitin J

APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING: Dear all, I am just writing to let you know of our recent paper on a Markov Model-based method to analyse time-varying networks in EEG task-related data: https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2018.00076 The method combines sparse-MVAR (Multi Variate Auto Regressive) modelling to estimate networks, with Markov modelling to characterise network changes. We propose this method as complementing existing methods to analyse time-varying networks in EEG/MEG task-related data. MATLAB code for the method can be downloaded from: https://github.com/nitinwilliams/eeg_meg_analysis/tree/master/sMVAR_MM_tool… Any comments/questions on the method/code are of course welcome. Regards, Nitin

Sept. 27, 2018

Workshop announcement: The HBP CodeJam #9 Workshop

by Andrew Davison

The HBP CodeJam #9 Workshop - Early-bird registration ends 30. Sept.! Grand Hotel Et Des Palmes, Palermo, Italy. Nov. 26, 2018 at 09:00 – Nov. 28, 2018 at 18:00 The goal of the CodeJam workshops is to catalyze open-source, collaborative software development in computational and systems neuroscience and neuroinformatics, by bringing together researchers, students and engineers to share ideas, present their work, and write code together. The general format of the workshops is to dedicate the mornings to invited and contributed talks, leaving the afternoons free for discussions, tutorials and code sprints. The theme of this 9th installment is "co-design": scientists, students and engineers from different disciplines collaborating to build research infrastructure for computation-based neuroscience, and to use this infrastructure to model brain circuits, behaviour and learning, develop novel bio-inspired computing systems, and help discover new drugs for neurological disorders. Topics of CodeJam#9: • Large-scale brain modelling: towards a mouse whole brain model • Cortical and subcortical microcircuit models: circuit and model workflows, simulation and analysing tools, computing resources and user interaction • Infrastructure and open data: Beyond traditional HPC, electrophysiology data formats and analysis • Visio-motor integration and hierarchical navigation planning: Integration with HBP Infrastructure (Neurorobotics platform) • Biological deep learning: Plasticity implementation on neuromorphic systems • Modelling for drug discovery and medicine Topics might change slightly, we are still finalizing the programme. Confirmed speakers (not yet complete): • Matteo Cantarelli • Oliver Schmid • Markus Diesmann • Stine Vennemo • Håkon Mørk • Armandi Romani • Genrich Ivaska • Shailesh Appukuttan • Bernd Schuller • Michael Denker • Alper Yegenoglu • Lorenzo Vannucci More information and registration details at https://neuralensemble.org/meetings/CodeJam9/ Registration fee: Early-bird registration ends on 30 September 2018 Programme Committee Luca L. Bologna (CNR), Andrew Davison (CNRS), Anna Kreshuk (U. Heidelberg), Eric Müller (U. Heidelberg), Jeff Muller (EPFL), Bernd Schuller (FZ Jülich) Organisers Luca L. Bologna (CNR), Alessia Bonafede (CNR), Martina Schmalholz (U. Heidelberg)

Sept. 27, 2018

Postdoctoral position in memory, sequence replay, and sleep

by Kamran Diba

<https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/diba-lab/>The Diba Lab <https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/diba-lab/> at the University of Michigan Medical School is currently recruiting a postdoctoral candidate for a project recently funded by two NIMH (R01 and R21) grants. The project involves a collaboration with Dr. Ted Abel’s lab at the University of Iowa to investigate the Molecular, Cellular and Circuit Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Hippocampal Function. The successful candidate will perform and analyze large-scale neuronal recordings from freely-behaving, sleeping and sleep-deprived animals, along with chemogenetic manipulations, immunohistochemistry and biochemical assays. Data analysis of oscillatory and sequential neuronal firing patterns, using MATLAB, python, and other tools, is critical for this research and the prospective candidate should demonstrate quantitative and programming skills. The salary will be based on the National Research Service Award (NRSA) payscale <https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-18-175.html>. Our lab is housed in the Department of Anesthesiology and the Center for Consciousness Science <https://consciousness.med.umich.edu/> at Michigan Medicine. We are affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering <http://bme.umich.edu/explore-research/> and the Neuroscience Graduate Program <http://neuroscience.med.umich.edu/program-0>. Collectively these programs and the University of Michigan at large provide a highly exciting and stimulating scientific environment for computational and systems neuroscience. The city of Ann Arbor is also consistently ranked <https://annarborusa.org/insights/communities/facts-rankings/> among the top places in the U.S. to live (with ready access to cultural events, sports, parks and natural beauty. Applicants should contact Kamran Diba: kdiba(a)umich.edu with a detailed C.V. or resume and a description of research background, skills, and interests. ------------- A top-ranked public university, the University of Michigan has a tradition of excellence in research, learning and teaching, sports and the arts, and more. The neuroscience community at the University of Michigan encompasses over 154 participating faculty from among 29 departments from the School of Medicine (including the Department of Anesthesiology), College of Literature Science and Arts, College of Engineering, School of Dentistry, School of Kinesiology and School of Public Health. As the longest standing neuroscience Ph.D. program in the United States the Neuroscience Graduate Program at U-Michigan has built an exceptional graduate program that features collaborative interactions among faculty and integration across individual disciplines. The program is composed of 70 to 80 graduate students (currently, 52% women, 30% under-represented minorities) and has more than 130 successful and accomplished alumni that work in academic research, industrial research and development, academic medicine and biotechnology. The NGP sponsors many activities that foster development of an active and cohesive neuroscience community on campus (e.g. Weekly Neuroscience Research Seminars, Annual Retreat, Spring Symposium, and Community Outreach).

Sept. 26, 2018

CFP: The OMG-Empathy Prediction Challenge

by Pablo Barros

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The One-Minute Gradual-Empathy Prediction (OMG-Empathy) Competition held in partnership with the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2019 in Lille, France. https://www2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/wtm/omgchallenges/omg_empathy.html I. Aim and Scope The ability to perceive, understand and respond to social interactions in a human-like manner is one of the most desired capabilities in artificial agents, particularly social robots. These skills are highly complex and require a focus on several different aspects of research, including affective understanding. An agent which is able to recognize, understand and, most importantly, adapt to different human affective behaviors can increase its own social capabilities by being able to interact and communicate in a natural way. Emotional expression perception and categorization are extremely popular in the affective computing community. However, the inclusion of emotions in the decision-making process of an agent is not considered in most of the research in this field. To treat emotion expressions as the final goal, although necessary, reduces the usability of such solutions in more complex scenarios. To create a general affective model to be used as a modulator for learning different cognitive tasks, such as modeling intrinsic motivation, creativity, dialog processing, grounded learning, and human-level communication, only emotion perception cannot be the pivotal focus. The integration of perception with intrinsic concepts of emotional understanding, such as a dynamic and evolving mood and affective memory, is required to model the necessary complexity of an interaction and realize adaptability in an agent's social behavior. Such models are most necessary for the development of real-world social systems, which would communicate and interact with humans in a natural way on a day-to-day basis. This could become the next goal for research on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and could be an essential part of the next generation of social robots. For this challenge, we designed, collected and annotated a novel corpus based on human-human interaction. This novel corpus builds on top of the experience we gathered while organizing the OMG-Emotion Recognition Challenge, making use of state-of-the-art frameworks for data collection and annotation. The One-Minute Gradual Empathy datasets (OMG-Empathy) contain multi-modal recordings of different individuals discussing predefined topics. One of them, the actor, shares a story about themselves while the other, the listener, reacts to it emotionally. We annotated each interaction based on the listener's own assessment of how they felt while the interaction was taking place. We encourage the participants to propose state-of-the-art solutions not only based on deep, recurrent and self-organizing neural networks but also traditional methods for feature representation and data processing. We also enforce that the use of contextual information, as well as personalized solutions for empathy assessment, will be extremely important for the development of competitive solutions. II. Competition Tracks We let available for the challenge a pre-defined set of training, validation and testing samples. We separate our samples based on each story: 4 stories for training, 1 for validation and 3 for testing. Each story sample is composed of 10 videos with interactions, one for each listener. Although using the same training, validation and testing data split, we propose two tracks which will measure different aspects of the self-assessed empathy: The Personalized Empathy track, where each team must predict the empathy of a specific person. We will evaluate the ability of proposed models to learn the empathic behavior of each of the subjects over a newly perceived story. We encourage the teams to develop models which take into consideration the individual behavior of each subject in the training data. The Generalized Empathy track, where the teams must predict the general behavior of all the participants over each story. We will measure the performance of the proposed models to learn a general empathic measure for each of the stories individually. We encourage the proposed models to take into consideration the aggregated behavior of all the participants for each story and to generalize this behavior in a newly perceived story. The training and validation samples will be given to the participants at the beginning of the challenge together with all the associated labels. The test set will be given to the participants without the associated labels. The team`s predictions on the test set will be used to calculate the final metrics of the challenge. III. How to Participate To participate to the challenge, please send us an email to barros @ informatik.uni-hamburg.de with the title "OMG-Empathy Team Registration". This e-mail must contain the following information: Team Name Team Members Affiliation Participating tracks We split the corpus into three subsets: training, validation and testing. The participants will receive the training and validation sets, together with the associated annotations once they subscribe to the challenge. The subscription will be done via e-mail. Each participant team must consist of 1 to 5 participants and must agree to use the data only for scientific purposes. Each team can choose to take part in one or both the tracks. After the training period is over, the testing set will be released without the associated annotations. Each team must submit, via e-mail, their final predictions as a .csv file for each video on the test set. Together with the final submission, each team must send a short 2-4 pages paper describing their solution published on Arxiv and the link for a github page to their solution. If a team fails to submit any of these items, their submission will be invalidated. Each team can submit 3 complete submissions for each track. IV. Important Dates 25th of September 2018 - Opening of the Challenge - Team registrations begin 1st of October 2018 - Training/validation data and annotation available 1st of December 2018 - Test data release 3rd of December 2018 - Final submission (Results and code) 5th of December 2018 - Final submission (Paper) 7th of December 2018 - Announcement of the winners V. Organization Pablo Barros, University of Hamburg, Germany Nikhil Churamani, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Angelica Lim, Simon Fraser University, Canada Stefan Wermter, Hamburg University, Germany -- Dr.rer.nat. Pablo Barros Postdoctoral Research Associate - Crossmodal Learning Project (CML) Knowledge Technology Department of Informatics University of Hamburg Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 22527 Hamburg, Germany Phone: +49 40 42883 2535 Fax: +49 40 42883 2515 barros at informatik.uni-hamburg.de https://www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/en/inst/ab/wtm/people/barros.html https://www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/en/inst/ab/wtm/

Sept. 26, 2018