Two great talks today:
Gerald Edelman talked about his notion of neural darwinism as a way
of understanding the function of neocortex. Highly mentioned in his
talk was the research of Krasnow alumnus Jeff Krichmar and his work
on the Darwin X robot. This is a robot that has a functioning model
of a hippocampus to navigate its way around the robot equivalent of
Morris water maze. Also cool, was NSI’s (click on the link above) Segway
Soccer Brain-Based Device–which destroyed the CMU Robot in a human
robot team version of soccer.
The other brilliant talk was led by Henry Markham who is a close
collaborator with Krasnow’s own Giorgio Ascoli. Markham is using
IBM’s Blue Gene Super-Computer to essentially reconstruct (at an
extraordinary level of biological fidelity) a cortical column.
Driving Markham’s work is the notion of a recipe for a cortical
column built up by using massively parallel patch recordings of
neocortical neurons from living cortical columns. More on this work
at http://bluebrainproject.epfl.ch/people.htm.
Tomorrow another half day of talks and then a quick jet ride down to
Pasadena and Caltech.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 