Online Workshop - Linking behavioral and neural dynamics

Online Workshop (together with Anton Sirota, LMU): “Linking behavioral and neural dynamics” (official announcement)

General description:

A large part of the brain is involved in behavior - ranging from planning upcoming movements to dealing with the sensory consequences. Accordingly, if we want to understand how neural circuits integrate a wide range of inputs to produce flexible and adaptive behaviors, it is essential to consider their functions in the context of behavior. Recent advances in experimental techniques enable measurements of movements at an unprecedented range of spatial and temporal scales in animals that are naturally interacting with their environment. A major challenge, however, is to infer the dynamic structure of behavior from the complex sequence of movement variables, often coming from a large number of different sensors. This challenge echoes the ongoing effort of extracting low-dimensional dynamics from the large scale neural activity data.

The workshop seeks to bring together experimental and computational work to discuss recent advances and to promote interaction between the two fields. Specifically, the workshop will focus on (1) novel experimental techniques that allow measurement of behavior at different temporal and spatial scales and (2) data-driven computational analysis of the measured behaviors. We will discuss the utility and the challenges of modern machine learning-based approaches, the integration of different temporal and spatial scales, and theoretical frameworks that enable new ways of studying brain function related to behavior.

Date: October 16, 5PM-8PM CEST

Schedule:

Intro: Anton Sirota (LMU Munich)

1. Gordon Berman (Emory University): Measuring the hidden dynamics of animal behavior
2. Arne Meyer (Radboud University Nijmegen): Dynamics of gaze control in freely moving mice
3. Jesse Marshall (Harvard University): The neural substrates of flexible behavior
4. Adam Calhoun (Princeton University): Capturing internal states through behavior
5. Scott Linderman (Stanford University): Animal pose estimation from video data with a hierarchical von Mises-Fisher-Gaussian model
6. Ann Kennedy (California Institute of Technology): Hypothalamic representations of internal state and behavior
7. Justin Graboski (LMU Munich): Exploratory behavior modulates hippocampal space code

Break

Panel discussion: Moderators: Bence Ölveczky (Harvard University) and Arne Meyer (Radboud University Nijmegen)