[Colloquium] Thursday, 5/23 | Stephanie Palmer at the Computational Social Science Workshop

[Nora Nickels]

THE COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP PRESENTSSTEPHANIE PALMERASSISTANT
PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ORGANISMAL BIOLOGY AND ANATOMY AND IN THE
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICSTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO



The Computational Social Science Workshop
<https://macss.uchicago.edu/content/computation-workshop>at the University
of Chicago cordially invites you to attend this week’s talk:


UNDERSTANDING VISION THROUGH THE LENS OF PREDICTION
<https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/stephanie_palmer>


Summary: Prediction is essential for interacting fluidly and accurately
with our environment because of the delays inherent to all brain circuits.
In order to interact appropriately with a changing environment, the brain
must respond not only to the current state of sensory inputs but must also
make rapid predictions of the future. In our work, we explore how our
visual system makes these predictions, starting as early as the retinal
cells in the eye. We borrow techniques from statistical physics and
information processing to assess how we get terrific, predictive vision
from these imperfect (lagged and noisy) component parts. To test whether
the visual system performs optimal predictive compression and computation,
we compute the past and future stimulus information in populations of
retinal ganglion cells, the output cells of the retina, in salamanders and
rats. For some simple stimuli with mixtures of predictive and random
components to their motion, we can derive the optimal tradeoff between
compressing information about the past stimulus while retaining as much
information as possible about the future stimulus. By changing parameters
in the input motion, we can explore qualitatively different motion
prediction problems. This allows us to begin to ask which prediction
problems the retina has evolved to solve optimally. Furthermore, we explore
how downstream circuits might use the predictive information in the
retina’s population code, given biologically plausible learning rules.


THURSDAY, 5/23/201911:00AM-12:20PMKENT 120


A light lunch will be provided by Cedar’s.



Stephanie Palmer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismal
Biology and Anatomy and in the Department of Physics at the University of
Chicago. She has a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford University where
she was a Rhodes Scholar, and works on questions at the interface of
neuroscience and statistical physics. Her recent work explores the question
of how the visual system processes incoming information, to make fast and
accurate predictions about the future positions of moving objects in the
environment. She was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and holds a
CAREER award from the NSF. Starting during her undergraduate years at
Michigan State University, Stephanie has been teaching chemistry, physics,
math, and biology to a wide range of students. At the University of
Chicago, she founded and runs the Brains! Program, which brings local
middle school kids from the South Side of Chicago to her lab to learn
hands-on neuroscience.


Readings (a little background on the surprising things the retina can
achieve, plus one of our papers on prediction in the retina):

   - Attached in Repository: Predictive information in a sensory population
   <https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/stephanie_palmer/blob/master/SEPalmer_PNAS_2015.pdf>
   - Attached in Repository: Eye Smarter than Scientists Believed: Neural
   Computations in Circuits of the Retina
   <https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/stephanie_palmer/blob/master/Gollisch_Meister.pdf>




------------------------------

The 2018-2019 Computational Social Science Workshop
<https://macss.uchicago.edu/content/computation-workshop>meets Thursdays
from 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Kent 120. All interested faculty and graduate
students are welcome.

Students in the Masters of Computational Social Science program are
expected to attend and join the discussion by posting a comment on the issues
page
<https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/stephanie_palmer/issues>of
the workshop’s public repository on GitHub.
<https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/stephanie_palmer> Further
instructions are documented in the Computational Social Science
Workshop’s README
on Github. <https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/README>
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