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Sparse Coding and Inference in Visual Cortex

Dr. Bruno Olshausen, Theoretical Neuroscience, UC Davis presents Sparse Coding and Inference in Visual Cortex

What Complex Systems Seminar
When April 19, 2006
from 04:10 pm to 05:00 pm
Where MSB 1147
Contact Name Bruno Olshausen
Contact Email
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Dr. Bruno Olshausen from the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Davis will lead a seminar titled Sparse Coding and Inference in Visual Cortex. All are invited to attend.

Our percepts of the world are clearly inferred, rather than being computed directly from the available data. This means that our brains must be endowed with powerful inferential machinery - i.e., probabilistic models - for combining incoming sensory information together with prior knowledge in order to infer what's "out there" in the environment. In this talk I will present a simple version of a probabilistic model for primary visual cortex (V1) that is based on the idea of sparse coding - i.e., where images are represented by a small number of active units at any given time. I will then present the results of computational simulations showing that this idea is consistent with the receptive field properties found in V1 neurons, and I will present data supporting the idea that cortical neurons are attempting to infer sparse representations of images. Both the model and the data make clear that if we are to actually understand what is going on the cortex, we need to focus our efforts on studying how it operates under natural conditions.

This seminar is part of CSE's ongoing Science of Complex Systems Seminar Series.