11. Bernstein Sparks Workshop: Naturalistic integration of information from external stimulation into the ongoing neuronal activities of the brain
October 20 - 23, 2016
Venue:
Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg
Lehmkuhlenbusch 4
27753 Delmenhorst/Germany
Organizers
- Udo Ernst, Universität Bremen
- David Rotermund, Universität Bremen
This workshop is funded by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the Bernstein Network for Computational Neuroscience, and from the HWK Focus Group “I-See – The artificial eye: chronic interfaces to the visual cortex”
In recent years, the development of functional neural prostheses has made substantial progress. The ideal process would be to directly stimulate visual, auditory or sensorimotor cortex and to integrate meaningful content into the ongoing neural processing of information through this artificial interface. However, simple electrical microstimulation is only capable of inducing coarse-grained percepts without temporal structure. During this workshop we want to discuss putative solutions to this problem as well as other technologies for constructing stimulation interfaces to the brain. Any successful attempt at building a cortical prosthesis needs a deep understanding of the networks, dynamics, and information processing in the targeted brain area. There are also technical challenges in realizing efficient brain stimulation and in building robust, long-lasting brain implants. Thus fostering the dialogue between scientists and engineers is an important goal of this workshop.
In summary, the aim of this workshop is to identify and to discuss important steps in the fields of neurobiology, computational neuroscience and engineering, which have to be taken in order to achieve a more naturalistic integration of 'artificial' information into ongoing neural information processing, hereby focusing on the development of cortical prostheses for animal research and, ultimately, for human patients.
Confirmed speaker
Costas Anastassiou, Sliman Bensmaia, Anthony Burkitt, Ilka Diester,
Eduardo Fernandez Jover, Jannis Hildebrandt, Kristine Krug, Mikhail Lebedev,
Tobias Moser, Thomas Lenarz, Hubert Lim, Ramesh Rajan, Christopher Rozell,
Mohamad Sawan,Günther Zeck, Eberhart Zrenner
Program
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Arrival, Check-in hotel
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee
16:00 – 16:15 Opening and Welcome
16:15 – 17:00 Mikhail A. Lebedev
Adding touch sensations to artificial hands
17:00 – 17:45 Hubert H. Lim
Restoring hearing with a new auditory midbrain implant
18:00 – 20:00 Dinner at HWK
20:00 – 21:00 Ramesh Rajan
An update on the Monash vision Group’s progress in developing
a visual cortical prosthesis
Friday, October 21, 2016
09:30 – 10:15 Kristine Krug
Electrical micro-stimulation of the visual cortex
10:15 – 11:00 Anthony Burkitt
Modelling electrical stimulation of neurons
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee Break
11:30 – 12:15 Christopher J. Rozell
Open- and closed-loop optogenetic stimulation for injecting
sensory info in vivo
12:15 – 14:00 Lunch at HWK
14:00 – 14:45 Eberhart Zrenner
Vision with retina implants
14:45 – 15:30 Günther Zeck
Technologies for high resolution electrical stimulation
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break
16:00 – 16:45 Eduardo Fernandez Jover
Intracortical microelectrodes and their bio-compability: Towards the
development of a cortical visual neuroprosthesis for the blind
16:45 – 17:30 Mohamad Sawan
Implantable bioelectronics for the diagnostic and treatment
of neurodegenerative diseases
18:00 – 19:30 Dinner at HWK
19:30 – 21:00 Discussions at the chimney
Saturday, October 22, 2016
09:30 – 10:15 Sliman Bensmaia
Biological and Bionic hands: Natural neural coding and
artificial perception
10:15 – 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 – 11:15 Andreas Kreiter
Stimulating into a working brain
11:15 – 11:45 Udo Ernst
Don't swim against the tide! - Using multistable states for interacting
with recurrent cortical networks and for controlling information processing
11:45 – 12:15 Dmitry Osipov
Integrated circuits for electrical stimulation
12:15 – 14:00 Lunch at HWK
14:00 – 14:30 Walter Lang
High density ECoG electrode arrays and floating neural probes for
chronic recording and stimulation
14:30 – 15:50 Theo Doll
Approaches towards closing the auditory (efferent) loop
14:50 – 15:30 Coffee Break
15:30 – 16:15 Jannis Hildebrandt
Controlling the inhibition via optogenetics
16:15 – 17:00 Tobias Moser
Optogenetic stimulaton of the auditory pathway for research
and future prosthetics
17:00 – 18:00 Postersession
18:00 – 19:30 Dinner at HWK
19:30 – 21:00 Postersession
Sunday, October 23, 2016
09:30 – 10:15 Thomas Lenarz
Prostheses for restoring hearing: A success story
10:15 – 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 – 11:30 Klaus Obermayer
Computational models of neurons and populations
exposed to weak electric fields
11:30 – 12:15 Alessandro Vato
Intracortical micro-stimulation as sensory feedback in
brain-machine interfaces
12:15 – 12:30 Final Discussion
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch at HWK
14:00 Departure