We would like to invite you to participate in our excellence workshop "Naturalistic integration of information from external stimulation into ongoing neuronal activities of the brain".
It will take place October 20-23, 2016 at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst (near Bremen), Germany.

The invited main speakers are Costas Anastassiou, Sliman Bensmaia, Anythony N. Burkitt, Ilka Diester, Jannis Hildebrandt, Eduardo Fernandez Jover, Andreas Kreiter, Kristine Krug, Walter Lang, Mikhail A. Lebedev, Thomas Lenarz, Hubert H Lim, Tobias Moser, Klaus Obermayer, Ramesh Rajan, Christopher J. Rozell, Mohamad Sawan, Alessandro Vato, Günther Zeck, Eberhart Zrenner.
A preliminary program can be found under http://www.nncn.de/en/news/events/11th-bernstein-sparks-workshop

As you might know quite well from your own experience, it is a huge problem to interface with the brain and to successfully introduce artificial, meaningful signals into on-going neural information processing. On the other hand, exciting possibilities in medical and fundamental research are waiting to be explored and to be realized. This workshop will address major challenges in this field:

* Ideas and technologies for improving functional neuro-prostheses. Besides presenting general advances, we will specifically focus on artificial vision and hearing, and on building better prosthetic limbs providing touch sensation feedback

* Using causal interference with neural processing as a tool for understanding how the brain works and processes information

* Establishing stimulation protocols and designing algorithms for providing external information with dynamics matching spatio-temporal activation patterns observed under 'normal' conditions, encoded in a format that the brain can 'understand'.

Our workshop will bring together experimentalists, technologists, medical scientists, and theoreticians who are the experts in getting meaningful signals into neuronal circuits actively engaged in information processing. The workshop will provide a platform allowing you to present your work and to have discussions with other researchers (especially from other disciplines, who use different methods or work on other areas of the brain) about putative solutions for solving this puzzle.

Besides the talks of the main speakers with plenty of time for discussions there will be a poster session. Participation in the workshop will be limited to about 60 attendees (20 main speakers, 40 postdocs + PhD students) on a first come first serve basis. In case you are interested in participating, we would ask you to send your reply to ajanssen@neuro.uni-bremen.de. In order to cover all costs, may we ask for a registration fee in the amount of € 60,00 (€ 40,00 for Bernstein members) for PhD students and € 120,00 (€ 80,00 for Bernstein members) for postdocs/professors. You will understand that we cannot cover your costs for accommodation and travelling.

The meeting is part of the "Bernstein Sparks Workshops series" and will be supported and partly financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Bernstein Coordination Site (BCOS) of the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience. Further support and financing is provided by the "Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study" ( http://www.h-w-k.de/index.php?id=2213 ).

Yours sincerely

Udo Ernst and David Rotermund