ANC Workshop - Lazaros Mitskopoulos and William Toner

Speaker: Lazaros Mitskopolous

Title: Dissecting the structure of interactions in neural populations

Abstract:

Large-scale simultaneous neural population recordings have been very important for advancing our understanding of neural information processing and improving performance of brain computer interfaces. However, most existing methods of analysis fall short of capturing the complexity of neuronal interactions within the concerted population activity. Furthermore, collective neural dynamics are in constant flux in response to changing behavioural and environmental statistics. In this talk, I will discuss the application of 1) non-parametric copula-based methods for more detailed characterizations of neural dependency structures and 2) tensor decomposition methods for unsupervised discovery of neural dynamics that span multiple time-scales. Both techniques offer valuable insights for neural circuit function and representation of behavioural variables.