What's New at the BCL
Fall 2008
Prof. Stiber has been appointed Director of the Computing and Software Systems Program. May God have mercy on his soul.
Summer 2008
Grant:The BCL and collaborators at Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins University, and Prarie View A&M University secured a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation for "Design, Implementation and Dissemination of Multidisciplinary online Java Digital Signal Processing (J-DSP) Materials"
Spring 2008
Biotechnology Institute:Prof. Stiber, along with UWB colleagues Prof. Steven Collins and Prof. Alan Leong, have formed the UWB Biotechnology and Biomedical Technology Institute (BBTI) as an interface between resources and events at UWB and the area life sciences industry.
Honor:
Prof. Stiber has been named a Fulbright Senior Specialists
Roster Candidate for the years 2008-2013 by the Council for International Exchange of
Scholars.
Winter 2008
Grant:The BCL, in collaboration with the UWB CSS Distributed Systems Lab, earned a $4,000 UWB Collaborative Undergraduate Research project grant to support the development of gridware for neural simulation.
A new look:
Our web site now has a new look, thanks to the efforts of Jeevan
Vaikunthanathan from Brian Bansenauer's BIT 113 class at Cascadia
Community College.
Fall 2007: Conference Paper
Conference paper:-
Michael Stiber, Fumitaka Kawasaki, and Dongming Xu, "A model of
dissociated cortical tissue", International Workshop on
Neuronal Coding, Montevideo, Uruguay, November 2007.
Summary: This is the first of a new line of investigation for the BCL. We are interested in understanding how developing brains form networks that perform useful tasks. One method that a number of investigators are using is growing cultures of "dissociated cortical tissue" -- brain cells from fetal rats -- on electrode arrays. The idea is to be able to probe networks as they develop. Unfortunately, what usually results is a network that produces large bursts of activity and little else. We now have a model of a small network that we used for a preliminary evaluation of how such activity might arise.
Summer 2007: NSF Grant
We received a grant (OISE-0652336) from the National Science Foundation for a "Joint US/Uruguay Workshop on Neuronal Coding", to be just before the International Workshop on Neuronal Coding in Montevideo, in November 2007.Spring 2007: Journal Paper
Journal paper:-
Michael Stiber, "Transient bifurcations in neural error
correction," Biosystems 89(1-3): 24-29, May-June
2007.
Summary: This paper continues our investigation into the significance of timing in nerve cells and, in particular, the possibility of error correcting codes. In this case, we looked at the interplay between errors and the kind of behavior a cell exhibits. We showed that we can predict the aftereffects of an error using our knowledge of a cell's nonlinear dynamics.
Fall 2006
The BCL received a $2,000 UWB Collaborative Undergraduate Research project grant, "Liquid state machines as models of cortical cultures."Prof. Stiber is on the organizing committee for the Neural Coding 2007 meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay.