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The Computational Social Science Workshop Presents
Stephanie Palmer
Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and in the Department of Physics
The University of Chicago
The Computational Social Science Workshop at the University of Chicago cordially invites you to attend this week's talk:
Summary: Prediction is essential for interacting fluidly and accurately with our environment because of the delays inherent to all brain circuits. In order to interact appropriately with a changing environment, the brain must respond not only to the current state of sensory inputs but must also make rapid predictions of the future. In our work, we explore how our visual system makes these predictions, starting as early as the retinal cells in the eye. We borrow techniques from statistical physics and information processing to assess how we get terrific, predictive vision from these imperfect (lagged and noisy) component parts. To test whether the visual system performs optimal predictive compression and computation, we compute the past and future stimulus information in populations of retinal ganglion cells, the output cells of the retina, in salamanders and rats. For some simple stimuli with mixtures of predictive and random components to their motion, we can derive the optimal tradeoff between compressing information about the past stimulus while retaining as much information as possible about the future stimulus. By changing parameters in the input motion, we can explore qualitatively different motion prediction problems. This allows us to begin to ask which prediction problems the retina has evolved to solve optimally. Furthermore, we explore how downstream circuits might use the predictive information in the retina’s population code, given biologically plausible learning rules.
Thursday, 5/23/2019
11:00am-12:20pm
Kent 120
A light lunch will be provided by Cedar's.
Stephanie Palmer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago. She has a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and works on questions at the interface of neuroscience and statistical physics. Her recent work explores the question of how the visual system processes incoming information, to make fast and accurate predictions about the future positions of moving objects in the environment. She was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and holds a CAREER award from the NSF. Starting during her undergraduate years at Michigan State University, Stephanie has been teaching chemistry, physics, math, and biology to a wide range of students. At the University of Chicago, she founded and runs the Brains! Program, which brings local middle school kids from the South Side of Chicago to her lab to learn hands-on neuroscience.
Readings (a little background on the surprising things the retina can achieve, plus one of our papers on prediction in the retina):
- Attached in Repository: Predictive information in a sensory population
- Attached in Repository: Eye Smarter than Scientists Believed: Neural Computations in Circuits of the Retina
The 2018-2019 Computational Social Science Workshop meets Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Kent 120. All interested faculty and graduate students are welcome.
Students in the Masters of Computational Social Science program are expected to attend and join the discussion by posting a comment on the issues page of the workshop's public repository on GitHub. Further instructions are documented in the Computational Social Science Workshop's README on Github.