INCF at CNS*2011 (part 1)
The 20th conference of the Organisation for Computational Neurosciences (OCNS) takes place in Stockholm, July 23-28 - and INCF is there.
Stockholm at this time of year is at its most beautiful - and also at its emptiest, when many inhabitants are spending their vacations elsewhere. The 500+ conference attendees at CNS*2011, the second largest CNS conference ever, are certainly noticeable where they mill around on the campus of the Royal Institute of Technology, and they fill its largest lecture hall to the absolute limits.
Prof. Ivan Soltesz lectures in front of a full auditorium at CNS*2011
The meeting began yesterday, July 23rd, with tutorials - we filmed one of them, and hope to be able to make the material available within a few weeks, in collaboration with the OCNS.
The main meeting days started today July 24th, with the "INCF Distinguished lecture" given by Dr Ivan Soltesz (and, as the name hints, sponsored by us), titled "Functional network connectivity of the control and epileptic hippocampus". He and his lab are working on some truly fascinating biological neural network studies with medical applications, combining experimental work and large-scale, anatomically and biophysically realistic modeling - for instance this recent PNAS study on the importance of "hubby" cells in the epileptic rat dentate gyrus, which shows how a small number of highly interconnected granule cells are able to change the dynamics of the network so that it becomes hyperexcitable and prone to epileptic seizures (see also the accompanying commentary by Dr Astrid Prinz). Several different probable candidates for such hub cells have been shown to exist.
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