2 PhD positions are available in the European Training Network project ENTRAIN-VISION in Prague, within the Marie Sklodowska-Curie ETN - Early Stage Researcher (PhD) program.

Blindness is the most feared handicap leading to the greatest exclusion from society by reducing patient autonomy and mobility. Clinical trials have demonstrated the possibility to regain some useful vision with retinal prostheses in patients having lost photoreceptors. New approaches are entering into clinical trials such as photovoltaic implants, optogenetic therapy and even cortical prostheses for patients having lost eye to brain connection. In the ENTRAIN-VISION project, the Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) will work on these innovative technologies for restoring vision in blind patients. Their training in academic institutes or industry will be completed by several secondments, including at least one at an industry partner. In addition, several summer schools will address scientific subjects on vision restoration and transferable skills in technology transfer, clinical trials, start-up creation, and communication to the media.

At the Computational Systems Neuroscience Group (CSNG) at Charles University in Prague, we will address the problem of how to encode visual stimulus, such that the stimulation of the targeted

visual processing stage (retina, thalamus or cortex) leads to perception of the given stimulus by the implanted subject. We will address this question via computational means, relying on both large-scale recurrent spiking neural network models of early visual system, as well as novel deep neural network machine learning techniques. This way, we will inform the future design of the visual prosthetic devices and contribute to the information processing software that will run on the implanted hardware.

What we offer:

Obtain a PhD from Charles University in Prague.
Internships at technological innovators Innovatric and GoodAI, and 3 month secondment at another ENTRAIN-VISION partner (see attachments for full list).
Work in close collaboration with the leading vision restoration lab of Dr. Serge Picaud at the Institute de la Vision, Paris.
A full-time 3-year paid contract, starting September 2020.

Main tasks and responsibilities:

Building and testing large-scale recurrent spiking neural network models of early visual system.
Extending these simulations with model of the prosthetic system, and calibrating the resulting simulation stack against physiological data provided by the project partners.
Developing encoding schemes for visual stimuli that will provide both accurate and efficient stimulation of the neural visual substrate.
Evaluating candidate encoding schemes in the simulation environment.
Finding efficient implementations of the selected encoding schemes in the low-powered prosthetic hardware.

Skills and qualifications:

Bachelor (BSc) and Master (MSc) in Physics/Mathematics/Engineer/Neuroscience/Computer Science or related fields
Programming skills: Python.
Willing to learn new skills and work in teams
High level of English proficiency
Prior experience in neural modelling a plus

For further information on all project partners, how to apply and deadlines please see attached documents.

Ján Antolík, PhD

Associate Researcher

Computational Systems Neuroscience Group

Faculty of Mathematics and Physics

Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic