Lecture: Duane Nykamp

Please join us for the following Biocomplexity Institute Seminar.

Tuesday, February 24
4:00-5:00 p.m.
(Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.)
Swain West 238

Duane Nykamp, Math, University of Minnesota, will present, "Toward a Second Order Description of Neuronal Networks."

Abstract:
The complexity of the activity of large numbers of neurons and their interconnectivity creates a challenge for understanding computations within the brain. The high dimensionality of the activity patterns and connectivity patterns, combined with the difficulty of estimating them from limited data sets, is a tremendous obstacle to an analysis of the relationships between the connectivity and the behavior of the network.

To address this complexity, I present a kinetic theory approach toward distilling complicated network connectivity into a simplified description of its second order statistics and then estimating what network behaviors result. Moreover, to connect the theoretical analysis with experiment, I present a connectivity analysis through which one may be able to constrain estimates of the connectivity statistics from experimental data while explicitly controlling for effects of hidden neurons. By linking the simplified network analysis to network structure in the brain, the connectivity analysis combined with the kinetic theory analysis could prove to be a powerful combination for probing relationships between network connectivity patterns and behavior.