Amrita School of Biotechnology’s Computational Neuroscience Lab participated at this year’s​ IJCNN held at INEC conventional center, Killarney, Ireland.

The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks is the premier international conference in the area of neural networks. IJCNN 2015 is organized by the International Neural Network Society (INNS), and sponsored jointly by INNS and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society – the two leading professional organizations for researchers working in neural networks.

Dr. Shyam Diwakar was invited for a talk titled “​Computational Neuroscience of Cerebellar Disorders– Studies of plasticity, timing and dysfunction from a cerebellar granular layer perspective” at the IJCNN workshop “​​Computational Neurology and Psychiatry: do we need it?” He was speaking alongside the organizers Prof. Basabdatta Bhattacharya of University of Lincoln (UK), Prof. Peter Erdi of Kalamazoo (US) and with other speakers including Prof. Abbas Edalat of Imperial College London (UK), Prof. Dean Petters of Birmingham City University (UK) and Prof. Daniel Levine of University of Texas at Arlington (USA).

IJCNN had already accepted two full papers by the PhD students Harilal Parasuram (“Exploiting Point Source Approximation on Detailed Neuronal Models to Reconstruct Single Neuron Electric Field and Population LFP”) and Krishna Chaitanya Medini (“Reconstructing fMRI BOLD signals arising from Cerebellar Granule Neurons‐Comparing GLM and Balloon Models”). Harilal’s work on cerebellum’s extracellular potentials was presented as an oral presentation and the session was also chaired by Dr. Shyam Diwakar. Chaitanya’s study on fMRI reconstructions was accepted and presented as a poster. Several experts appreciated both presentations. This year’s IJCNN also features a keynote by Prof. Giacomo Rizzolati (University of Parma, Italy), discoverer of mirror neurons and Prof. Steve Furber (University of Manchester, UK) on his invention, the SpiNNAker neuron based processor chip.

Dr. Shyam’s visit was partially supported by Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology CTEP via a travel grant. The conference papers are indexed in IEEE Xplore and on Scopus and a post-workshop book chapter contribution in Springer is also being planned to showcase the results of the studies.