[Bmi] Jack Gallant's brain result is related to computer science

[Juyang Weng]

Dear Colleagues:

Sorry, if you are not interested in my "crazy" view below, do not read 
further.
Otherwise, if you like to know why, BMI 2015 summer courses will teach.
Full-time students get tuition-free.   The brain is both extremely complex
and simple at the same time, depending on how you look at it with what
knowledge.  Sorry, I will not post this information onto the connectionist
mailing list.

-John
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Date: 	Thu, 23 Apr 2015 11:02:42 -0400
From: 	Juyang Weng <weng at cse.msu.edu>
To: 	faculty
CC: 	Juyang (John) Weng <weng at cse.msu.edu>
Subject: 	Re: talk info.


Dear Colleagues:

Prof. Jack Gallant's talk is closely related to computer science more than
he probably would like to agree. I recommended his visit but, sorry, my
explanation below has not got his approval:

The entire brain is a huge look-up table because the controller of
a Turing Machine is equivalent to a Finite Automaton (sorry, not widely
accepted yet).   Still remember the transition function of a Finite Automaton?
It has two input parameters, input and state.  Prof. Jack Gallant's
results beautifully showed that which entries in the table are looked up
depend on not only input, but also state (i.e., intent).  When the state
changed, very different inputs were looked up!

-John

On 4/22/15 6:44 PM, Pang-Ning Tan wrote:
> FYI
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: 	Talk by Professor Jack Gallant, May 4th, 5:30pm, Psychology 118.
> Date: 	Tue, 31 Mar 2015 11:36:44 -0400
> From: 	J. Devin McAuley <dmcauley.msu at gmail.com>
> To: 	psyfaculty at psy.msu.edu, "cogsci at cogsci.msu.edu"
> <cogsci at cogsci.msu.edu>, cogscifac at cogsci.msu.edu, coggrads at cogsci.msu.edu
>
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> We are very pleased to announce that the Cognitive Science Program and
> Social Science Data Analytics Initiative will be hosting Professor Jack
> Gallant from the University of California, Berkeley on Monday, May 4th.
>
> Dr. Gallant's talk is scheduled for 5:30pm (reception at 5pm) on May 4th
> in Psychology Bldg Room 118. We will begin arranging meeting times for
> those of you who are interested in scheduling one in a couple of weeks.
>
> Title and abstract for the talk are below. You can access background
> readings at http://www.cogsci.msu.edu/DSS/2014-2015/Gallant/index.html
>
> Please help spread the word!
>
> All the best,
> Devin
>
> Mapping, modeling and decoding the human brain under naturalistic
> conditions.
> *
> *
> One important goal of Psychology and Neuroscience is to understand the
> mental and neural basis of natural behavior. This is a challenging
> problem because natural behavior is difficult to parameterize and
> measure. Furthermore, natural behavior often involves many different
> perceptual, motor and cognitive systems distributed broadly across the
> brain. Over the past 10 years my laboratory has developed a new approach
> to functional brain mapping that recovers detailed information about the
> cortical maps mediating natural behavior. We first use functional MRI to
> measure brain activity while participants perform natural tasks such as
> watching movies or listening to stories. We analyze these data by means
> of two statistical approaches developed in my laboratory: voxel-wise
> modeling (VM) is used to discover how information is mapped across the
> cortex of each individual subject, and a probabilistic and generative
> model of areas tiling cortex (PrAGMATiC) is used to recover putative
> functional areas at the group level. Our results show that even simple
> natural behaviors involve dozens or hundreds of distinct functional
> gradients and areas, that these are organized similarly in the brains of
> different individuals, and that top-down mechanisms such as attention
> can change these maps on a very short time scale. These statistical
> modeling tools provide powerful new methods for mapping the
> representation of many different perceptual and cognitive processes
> across the human brain, and for decoding brain activity.
>
>

-- 
--
Juyang (John) Weng, Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program
428 S Shaw Ln Rm 3115
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
Tel: 517-353-4388
Fax: 517-432-1061
Email: weng at cse.msu.edu
URL: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/
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