Neuroscience 4 QuantumBrain

I am very happy today as I have been given my first choice lab projects for both Hilary and Trinity terms (Oxford jargon for 2nd and 3rd terms).

In Hilary term, I will be working with Colin Akerman in the pharmacology department. The project will be looking at neural coding of the developing visual system in Xenopus Laevis tadpoles. This includes tracing individual neurons at birth from a progenitor cell in the tadpole’s retinotectal system and recording the development of their spiking activity using calcium imaging with two photon fluorescence microscopy. The aim is to relate the developing activity with a mathematical model using receptive field mapping over the entire tectum to elucidate the process of development of an individual neuron’s functional identity within the network.

In Trinity term I will be working with Simon Stringer who leads the Oxford Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artifical Intelligence. The project will involve developing computational models of object invariant recognition in vision by projecting 1D objects onto a 1D input neural network and mapping this to a 2D neural network using feedforward and self-organising-map (SOM) connections. The network will be trained to recognise the objects such that the output receptive field will comprise object invariant domains surrounded by orientaion (or position, in the case of 1D objects) selective maps (one for each object). This results from sparse activity in the output layer so as to allow for orthogonal (i.e. non-overlapping) hyperdimensional (I didn’t really need to include that word but it’s cool, isn’t it?) vector representations of individual objects. This isn’t the case in the real brain where activity in cells further along in the feed forward chain (e.g. inferotemporal cortex) can involve ~50% of the cells, leading to highly convoluted representations. Time permitting, the project will aim to extract individual object recognition in the output layer from highly overlapping vector representations.

I’m dead chuffed with this as it will allow me to use lots of maths which, I must admit, I have been missing from my physics days. When I get the time (hopefully this Christmas holiday) I will expand on these projects on the dedicated neuroscience pages of the main website.