“Google’s worldwide Science Fair competition …is calling for entries over the next few days. It gives kids the opportunity to join in a new kind of online science competition…offering them the chance to win … prizes including a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands or a $50,000 scholarship.”

They paid us to post this video of a Rube Goldberg machine (you don’t need sound, it’s just random music):

(you won’t be able to see it if you have AdBlock enabled)

While we’re all distributing scientific resources, I thought I’d point out that the KITP has a wonderful program on Emerging Techniques in Neuroscience, currently underway at UCSB. They have a great lineup of speakers with some overlap with the Allen Institute program. Videos of the talks are being posted online here.

So many good videos from good neuroscientists (including Chuck Stevens, John Hopfield, Clay Reid, Jeff Magee, Guoqiang Bi, and many more)… it’s going to take me a while to get through these. Enjoy!

http://tnsre.bme.jhu.edu/

2. 39th Neural Interfaces Conference
Co-sponsored by NIH Deep Brain Stimulation Consortium
June 21-23, 2010, Long Beach, CA
Free registration for students (Faculty Advisor letter due May 21)
Program, registration, and further information:

http://www.neuralinterfaces2010.com/

A workshop on the topic “Beyond Brain Machine Interface: From Senses to Cognition” (http://tnsre.bme.jhu.edu), sponsored by Army Research Office and IEEE EMBS, will take place on June 20, 2010, just preceding the Neural Interfaces Conference (June 21-23, Long Beach, CA). The goal of the workshop is to push the frontiers of BMI, from sensory and motor interfaces to enhancing cognitive and physical performance. To achieve this vision, the Workshop will provide a state of the art review of the field, share experiences with current systems and experimental paradigms and then present ideas and initiatives for future activities in the field.

The workshop will be designed with a pioneering spirit to push the frontiers of BMI in humans. Distinguished leaders in the field will give reviews and keynote presentations. Active researchers and young scientists are invited to present their work and progress. Junior scientists, postdocs, and advanced graduate students are invited to apply for travel fellowships to participate and to display their posters by sending an email with an abstract and a CV to editortnsre at gmail.com with subject “Beyond BMI Workshop”. The registration form and further information is available at “http://tnsre.bme.jhu.edu/”.

—

39th Neural Interfaces Conference Highlights:

- June 21-23, 2010, Long Beach Convention Center, Long Beach, CA

- 30 platform presentations from leaders in neuromodulation and neural engineering
- 176 poster presentations
- 23 sponsors, including major Neurotech companies (Medtronic, St. Jude Neuromod), small businesses as well as NIH and the VA
- The broad and generous sponsorship allows for low-cost registration without compromising the quality of the meeting
- FREE registration for students (details below)
- Attended by an multi-disciplinary group of clinicians, engineers, and scientists representing academia and industry

All students are eligible for no cost registration. When registering on-line for the conference, under the payment section, please select “student”. Please note, your conference registration is not complete until you submit a letter from your Faculty Advisor confirming your current student status. The letter must be written or typed on your schools letterhead and submitted no later than Friday, May 21st. Your no-cost student registration for the conference is contingent upon receiving this letter. Letters may be emailed to Lex Davies at LDavies@JBSAssociates.ws or mailed to her attention at 954 La Mirada Street, Laguna Beach CA 92651.

Conference program, registration, and more information at:

http://www.neuralinterfaces2010.com/

Registration: $35 http://www.jsnc.caltech.edu/

We invite you to submit an abstract for a poster presentation by May 7.
Email abstracts in PDF format to “(email omitted)”.
See registration website for further details:

Preliminary Program:

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
“Mechanisms of competition and plasticity in developing visual cortex”
Michael Stryker
USCF

SESSION 1: MOTOR CONTROL

“What Does the Brain Control?”
Gerald E. Loeb, M.D.
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Director of the Medical Device Development Facility
University of Southern California

“Stochastic Control by Neural Populations”
Terence D. Sanger, MD PhD
Dept. Biomedical Engineering
University of Southern California

“New Strategies for Studying Higher Level Motor Disorders”
Howard Poizner
Institute for Neural Computation
UCSD

SESSION 2: VISION

“Functional impacts of modular organization in primary visual cortex”
David C. Lyon
Dept. of Anatomy and Neurobiology
UC Irvine

“Neural Mechanisms of Visual Crowding”
Prof. Bosco Tjan
Dept. of Psychology and Neuroscience Graduate Program
USC

Title TBA
George Sperling
Dept. of Cognitive Sciences & Dept. of Neurobiology & Behavior
UC Irvine

SESSION 3: PERCEPTION & ATTENTION

Title TBA
Charles Chubb
Dept. of Cognitive Sciences
UC Irvine

“From attention to decision: Optimal reward harvesting in complex
perceptual environments”
Vidhya Navalpakkam
Caltech

“Crossmodal interactions and causal inference in perception and learning”
Ladan Shams
Dept. of Psychology
UCLA

SESSION 4: LEARNING & NEURAL CODING

“Coincidence Detection vs. Temporal Integration in Insect Olfaction”
Maxim Bazhenov
UC Riverside and Salk Institute

“Mechanisms of hippocampal rate and temporal codes”
Mayank Mehta
Dept. of Physics
UCLA

“Infomax control”
Javier Movellan
Machine Perception Laboratory
UCSD

Registration fee: $35. Payable at the door by cash or by check made out
to UC Regents. Registration fee includes lunch and refreshments.

Please register online before Wednesday, May 21:

http://www.jsnc.caltech.edu/

Location: UCLA’s Neuroscience Research Building (NRB) auditorium

Symposium Organizer: Tad Blair (email omitted)

Program Committee:

Bartlett Mel, USC
Geroge Sperling, UCI
Pietro Perona, Caltech
Gert Cauwenberghs, UCSD
Dario Ringach, UCLA

Webmaster:

Trity Pourbahrami, Caltech

….thought I might have something of interest to
your readers, especially those who were trained in robotics. This summer,
Penn is hosting our second Neuroscience Boot Camp, a chance for individuals
without a neuroscience background to quickly gain a working knowledge of the
subject. The program is specifically targeted so that participants can
apply this information to other fields. You’ll find the full information
below. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks,
Kezia Kamenetz

Penn Center for Neuroscience & Society
3810 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19139

—————————————————————

Applications are now being accepted for the 2010 Neuroscience Boot Camp at
the University of Pennsylvania. We are excited about the second annual boot
camp, keeping what worked so well this past summer — great teachers, a
small but very diverse group of students, and a varied set of teaching
methods — and making it even better!

Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and
laboratory visits, Boot Camp participants will gain an understanding of the
methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and
social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders
of brain function. Like last year’s faculty, the 2010 Boot Camp faculty
consists of leaders in the fields of cognitive and affective neuroscience
who are committed to the goal of educating non-neuroscientists.

For additional information and instructions on how to apply, visit our
website at:
http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/events/neuroscience-bootcamp or send
an email to bootcamp at neuroethics dot upenn dot edu. Please let me know if you have
any questions!

Then again, what is SfN without some great partying? A zoo of posters and tired feet!

Sadly, I believe the MIT Picower party has gone the way of Bernie Madoff. In fact, that’s literally the case. Happily, there are some alternatives. Almost all of them are happening on Sunday night. These include the Neuron party, a UChicago party at a local rock club, and the “unofficial” MIT party (a house party thrown by the 2nd year class). Since I’m not directly involved in any of these efforts, I’ll abstain from posting details here. But those of you who know me can check out my Facebook for details on two of them or, if you haven’t joined the social network craze, just drop me a line. Tomorrow night should be fun! And since my poster is on Monday after most of the partying is over, at least I’ll know that those of you who stop by are there for the science and not to extract party details…

I’m a fan of it because it is an open-access journal featuring a “tiered system” and more.  From their website:

The Frontiers Journal Series is not just another journal. It is a new approach to scientific publishing. As service to scientists, it is driven by researchers for researchers but it also serves the interests of the general public. Frontiers disseminates research in a tiered system that begins with original articles submitted to Specialty Journals. It evaluates research truly democratically and objectively based on the reading activity of the scientific communities and the public. And it drives the most outstanding and relevant research up to the next tier journals, the Field Journals.

I’m a big fan of the variety of specialty journals they have:

• Aging Neuroscience
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Cellular Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Enteric Neuroscience
• Evolutionary Neuroscience
• Human Neuroscience
• Integrative Neuroscience
• Molecular Neuroscience
• Neural Circuits
• Neuroanatomy
• Neuroenergetics
• Neuroengineering
• Neurogenesis
• Neurogenomics
• Neuroinformatics
• Neuromethods
• Neuropharamacology
• Neuroprosthetics
• Neurorobotics
• Synaptic Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

The conference sessions will cover several key areas in the neuroprosthetic development, such as deep brain stimulation for treatment of Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy, devices for restoring hearing and overcoming muscle paralysis, microelectrode biocompatibility, and novel microelectrode technologies. For detailed conference program and registration information, please visit http://www.bsrc.nctu.edu.tw/ICND/.