While substantial progress has been made in the past 80 years of intense research, the principles by which our brain encodes visual information, even at the earliest stages of processing, remains poorly understood.
While substantial progress has been made in the past 80 years of intense research, the principles by which our brain encodes visual information, even at the earliest stages of processing, remains poorly understood. Concurrently, the emerging field of brain prosthetic implants for vision restoration is heavily dependent on a precise understanding of visual coding in cortical networks.
In this presentation, I will first illustrate how large-scale, biologically nuanced simulations of cortical networks can synthesize fragmented experimental data, thereby enhancing our grasp of visual information encoding principles in our brain. Subsequently, I will discuss how such simulations can be instrumental in devising stimulation protocols for cortical visual implants. Finally, I will present a newly devised method, born out of insights from these simulations, which estimates the visual coding beneath the implant along with its validation on data collected from blind implanted volunteers.
Jan Antolík is a computational neuroscientist based in Prague where he leads the Computational Systems Neuroscience Group at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. Jan obtained his PhD at University of Edinburgh followed by post-doc at University College London and CNRS, France, before returning back to his alma-mater. His main research interests are systems neuroscience, visual system, sensory coding and prosthetic sensory restoration. He seeks to understand how visual information is transformed as it passes through the various stages of visual processing to form what we experience as our everyday visual perception of the world. Recently he has been increasingly focused on applying this basic research to the problem of designing future neural-prosthetic systems for vision restoration.
Its program consists of a one-hour lecture followed by a discussion. The lecture is based on an (internationally) exceptional or remarkable achievement of the lecturer, presented in a way which is comprehensible and interesting to a broad computer science community. The lectures are in English.
The seminar is organized by the organizational committee consisting of Roman Barták (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Jaroslav Hlinka (Czech Academy of Sciences, Computer Science Institute), Michal Chytil, Pavel Kordík (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Information Technologies), Michal Koucký (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Jan Kybic (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), Michal Pěchouček (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), Jiří Sgall (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics), Vojtěch Svátek (University of Economics, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics), Michal Šorel (Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Information Theory and Automation), Tomáš Werner (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), and Filip Železný (CTU in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering)
The idea to organize this seminar emerged in discussions of the representatives of several research institutes on how to avoid the undesired fragmentation of the Czech computer science community.
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