CSAIL Event Calendar: Previous Series

Modularity, synchronization, and what we may learn from the brain

Speaker: Jean-Jacques Slotine , Nonlinear Systems Laboratory, MIT
Date: October 25 2005
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: 34-401
Host: Daniela Rus, Csail, MIT

Although neurons as computational elements are 7 orders of magnitude
slower than their artificial counterparts, the primate brain grossly
outperforms robotic algorithms in all but the most structured
tasks. Parallelism alone is a poor explanation, and much recent
functional modelling of the central nervous system focuses on its
modular, heavily feedback-based computational architecture, the result
of accumulation of subsystems throughout evolution. We discuss this
architecture from a global stability and convergence point of view. We
then study synchronization as a model of computations at different
scales in the brain, such as pattern matching, temporal binding of
sensory data, and mirror neuron response. Finally, we derive a simple
condition for a general dynamical system to globally converge to a
regime where multiple groups of fully synchronized elements coexist.
Applications of such "polyrhythms" to some classical questions in
robotics and systems neuroscience are discussed.

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