Site for NIPS – Large Scale Brain Dynamics Workshop (Will be updated shortly)

Organizers: Ryan Canolty (UC Berkeley) & Kai Miller (University of Washington)

Central questions:

• What are the relevant aspects of the large scale cortical signal for feature extraction?
• What is special about “high – gamma”, and why? This is clearly unresolved (and contentious) and many differing hypotheses are out there, unpublished, regarding what it is.
• How do different features relate to each other, and what does this say about the mechanisms underlying each?
• Are there asynchronous as well as synchronous processes? This may apply to characteristic potential time-series changes as well as noise-like changes.
• What constraints are there on the large scale potential measurements at the brain surface? (Is there a cutoff frequency for signal extraction? How reproducible are phenomena? What is the true temporal fidelity?)
• If two cortical areas are communicating, what sort of ECoG signal features would be present?
• What is the best way to track activity in multiple brain regions associated with a complex task (e.g., picture naming involves the entire ventral visual processing stream, higher-order linguistic areas, mouth motor areas, and auditory areas, and different trials will have different reaction times and processing-stage-specific variable delays)

Goal of the workshop:

We would like to have an open forum where emerging and established researchers in large scale brain dynamics can discuss what the real issues and unanswered questions in the field are. There hasn’t been a forum for this yet. Many individuals have common ideas about what the relevant features of the large scale potential are, but very different ideas about what they mean. This workshop will provide a setting where a diverse range of researchers will present their ideas and these ideas will be discussed in an open forum, with presentation and discussion given equal footing.

General structure:

The workshop will be for two days. The morning sessions will be centered around talks by senior individuals in the field and will be requested to be of a general nature (larger picture). The afternoon sessions will consist of both talks and posters by graduate students and post-docs, and deal with recent experimental and theoretical findings (focused, specific, picture). More time will be devoted to discussion in the evening sessions (50-60%) than in the morning sessions (40-50%).

Talks will be timed, and the duration will be strictly enforced so that adequate time is allotted for discussion.

There will be a poster session at the end of the first day.

Website/Summary article:

Readings and submission articles will be put on a locked website for workshop participants. Original work will be published in online proceedings in unlocked portion. Canolty, Miller, and advisors will write a review about the central motifs of the workshop, with particular attention to subjects of controversy. We will write the NIPS editors or the editors of several relevant journals ahead of time and ask for pre-approval for the review.

Miscellaneous

The workshop will emphasize feature extraction with an emphasis on biologically relevant feature identification. While the behavior and usefulness of features for feedback will be discussed, this is not a “BCI” workshop.

Speakers will be invited to recommend one or two references relevant to their talk. They may pick existing manuscripts from the literature or submit something of their own which will be published in online proceedings (unless we are able to obtain printed proceedings through NIPS or a journal).

Current List of Speakers:

Bijan Pesaran	bijan@nyu.edu
Eric Leuthardt	ericleuthardt@sbcglobal.net
Eva Pastalkova (Buzsaki Lab)	pastak@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Florian Mormann	florian@klab.caltech.edu
Jeffrey Ojemann	jojemann@u.washington.edu
Jose Principe	principe@cnel.ufl.edu
Joshua Jacobs (Kahana Lab)	jojacobs@med.upenn.edu
Klaus Mueller	klaus-robert.mueller@first.fraunhofer.de
Marcel den Nijs	dennijs@phys.washington.edu
Nathan Crone	ncrone@jhmi.edu
Pascal Fries	P.Fries@fcdonders.ru.nl
Scott Makeig	smakeig@ucsd.edu
Terry Sejnowski	terry@salk.edu
Walter Freeman	drwjfiii@berkeley.edu