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Dear All,<br>
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This course will start from the following Monday. You might like
to suggest that some of your advisees take it. Travel is not
needed, since it is a distance learning course. Thanks.<br>
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Best regards,<br>
<br>
-John Weng<br>
BMI 871 Instructor<br>
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<h3 align="center">BMI 871: Computational Brain-Mind<br>
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<p align="center"><strong>A </strong>
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<strong>Distance Learning Course<br>
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August 6 - 24, 2012<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.brain-mind-institute.org/bmi-871.html">http://www.brain-mind-institute.org/bmi-871.html</a></p>
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<h4 align="center">Course Description</h4>
<p>This course introduces computational principles of biological
brain, which give rise to the various functions of mind. An
emphasis is on regarding the brain as a highly integrated
developmental system so that the models and principles are
applicable to small biological brains (e.g., fruit flies),
large biological brains (e.g., humans), and artificial ones
(e.g., machines and robots). The material integrates knowledge
in computer science, neuroscience, psychology (also cognitive
science), biology, electrical engineering, physics,
mathematics, and other related disciplines. The course is
suited for faculty, senior researchers, postdocs, and graduate
students in any discipline — natural sciences, engineering,
and social sciences — who are interested in studying how the
brain-mind works. The subjects include: Computational
development of biological brains. Machine's symbolic
representations. Brain's emergent representations and
architectures. Brain's spatial representations. Brain's
temporal representations. Perception, cognition, attention
(bottom-up and top-down), learning, behaviors, abstraction,
reasoning, decision making. Vision, audition, touch,
multimodality, and integration. Modulatory system:
reinforcement, motivation and emotion. The above subjects are
detailed down to neuronal computation, cutting across levels
of molecules, synapses, cells, circuits, systems, brains,
experience, functions, and group intelligence. </p>
<p>Examples of fundamental discipline questions to be discussed:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Biology</strong>: How do individually autonomous
cells interact to give rise to animal behaviors?</li>
<li><strong>Neuroscience</strong>: From an overarching
perspective, how does the brain self-organize?</li>
<li><strong>Psychology</strong>: How does an integrated brain
architecture realize many psychological learning models
(e.g., classical conditioning and instrumental
conditioning)?</li>
<li><strong>Computer Science</strong>: Why is the automata
theory a special case of the brain's neural network theory?</li>
<li><strong>Electrical Engineering</strong>: How does a brain
perform general-purpose nonlinear control, beyond Kalman
filtering?</li>
<li><strong>Mathematics</strong>: How does a brain perform
general-purpose high-dimensional, nonlinear optimization?</li>
<li><strong>Physics</strong>: How do meanings arise from
physics?</li>
</ul>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
--
Juyang (John) Weng, Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program
3115 Engineering Building
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
Tel: 517-353-4388
Fax: 517-432-1061
Email: <a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:weng@cse.msu.edu">weng@cse.msu.edu</a>
URL: <a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cse.msu.edu/%7Eweng/">http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/</a>
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