The UW Institute for Neuroengineering presents:

“Neural inspired sparse sensors”
Bing Brunton
Washington Research Foundation Innovation Assistant Professor in Neuroengineering
Department of Biology, University of Washington

and

“Navigation across spatial scales”
David Gire
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Washington

Abstracts:

“Neural inspired sparse sensors” (Bing Brunton):

Biological organisms are remarkably adept at interacting with high-dimensional physical systems in nature, yet they sometimes rely on information gathered through only a handful of sensory organs. This strikingly efficient sensory-motor performance is possible in part because natural signals are inherently compressible, having relatively low-dimensional features underlying high-dimensional dynamics. Our approach to understanding this sensory-motor transformation combines insights from compressed sensing, techniques from dimensionality reduction, and feature extraction inspired by neurophysiological recordings.

“Navigation across spatial scales” (David Gire):

Optimally integrating real-time data from noisy sensors with probabilistic knowledge of the current state of the environment is one of the great challenges in the development of autonomous robotic systems.  Fortunately, this problem also represents a major source of selective pressure across numerous animal species, resulting in brains that have evolved to efficiently utilize noisy sensory cues to navigate dynamic environments.  To test how animal brains address these challenges under naturalistic conditions we have developed a fully-automated open field arena that gives us precise control over both stimulus delivery and the entire history of an animal’s interaction with its environment.  I will discuss results from a first set of experiments that used this system to investigate how memory influences odor-guided searches for food in turbulent flow.