I am pleased to invite you to attend the MiNDS Colloquium TODAY Thursday May 23rd at 3:00 in HSC 4E20. Bring your coffee cup for coffee and cookies before the talk at 2:45.

Dr Chris Eliasmith is a Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience, and currently director of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience.  He is jointly appointed to Systems Design Engineering and Philosophy and holds a cross-appointment to Computer Science.  His new book 'How to build a brain' is coming out in May with Oxford University press.

Dr Eliasmith's lab is interested in understanding how the brain works. They research perception, action, cognition, and basic theoretical issues from a neural perspective. Most of this research is carried out by building large-scale models (usually simulating single neurons) of various brain areas.

Recent high-profile brain simulations, including those of the $1 billion Euro Human Brain Project, are very large and complex. However, they do not exhibit interesting behaviours and so are difficult to compare to what we know about the brain. In his talk, Dr Eliasmith will describe the methods and tools used to construct what is currently the world's largest *functional* brain simulation, called the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network (Spaun).  Chris will  demonstrate the variety of behaviors the model exhibits and show that it is similar in many
respects to human and animal behaviour.  He argues that constructing such large-scale simulations is critical for advancing our understanding of neural function.

We look forward to seeing you all at the talk today.

 

Regards

 

Kathy

 

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Kathryn M Murphy PhD

Professor and Director MiNDS Graduate Program

Dept of Psychology Neuroscience & Behaviour

McMaster University

1280 Main St W 

Hamilton ON L8S 4K1