Self-Organization of Neural Systems - An Evolutionary and Developmental Perspective
- When?
- Friday 4 February 2011, 15:30 to 16:30
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Students, Staff
- Speaker:
- Professor Yaochu Jin
Understanding the principles behind the self-organization of biological nervous systems is the key to understanding cognition. This talk presents our recent research efforts on understanding neural self-organization from the evolutionary and developmental point of view. A computational model is built up for co-evolving the development of the neural system and body plan of an animate based on primitive organisms such as hydra and flatworm. The neural and morphological development is simulated with a multi-cellular system governed by a gene regulatory network. Our results suggest that energy efficiency might be the most important constraint in neural self-organization. In addition, a close coupling between the evolution of neural systems and body plan is also revealed.
At the end of the talk, preliminary work on modelling of neural plasticity, which can be seen as a form of activity-dependent neural development, will be presented very briefly. A gene regulatory network model is interleaved with a BCM spiking neural network as well as a reservoir computing framework for more powerful spatiotemporal pattern recognition.
