The Computation and Neural Systems (CNS) program was established at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1986 with the goal of training Ph.D. students interested in exploring the relationship between the structure of neuron-like circuits/networks and the computations performed in such systems, whether natural or synthetic. The program was designed to foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration among engineers, neuroscientists, and theoreticians.

History

In the early 1980s, having laid out the foundations of VLSI,

Carver Mead Carver Andress Mead (born May 1, 1934) is an American scientist and engineer. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), ...

became interested in exploring the similarities between computation done in the brain and the type of computations that could be carried out in analog silicon electronic circuits. Mead joined with

John Hopfield John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network. Biography Hopfield was born in 1933 to Pol ...

, who was studying the theoretical foundations of neural computation,Hopfield, J.J.
Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities
'' Proc. NatL Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 79, pp. 2554-2558, April 1982 to expand his study. Mead and Hopfield's first joint course in this area was entitled “Physics of Computation”; Hopfield teaching about his work in neural networks and Mead about his work in the area of replicating neuronal structures in highly integrated electronic circuits.Shirley K. Cohen, ''Interview with Carver Mead''. Archives of the California Institute of Technology.
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Given the interest among both students and faculty, they decided to expand upon these themes in the following year.

Richard Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superflu ...

joined them and three separate courses resulted: Hopfield's on neural networks, Mead's on neuromorphic analog circuits, and Feynman's course on the physics of computation. At this point, Mead and Hopfield realized that a new field was emerging with neural scientists and the people doing the computer models and circuits all talking to each other. In the fall of 1986,

championed forming an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program to give birth to a scholarly community studying questions arising at the interface between neurobiology and electrical engineering, computer science and physics. It was called ''Computation and Neural Systems'' (CNS). The unifying theme of the program was the relationship between the physical structure of a computational system (physical or biological hardware), the dynamics of its operation and the computational problems that it can efficiently solve. The creation of this multidisciplinary program stems largely from progress on several previously unrelated fronts: the analysis of complex neural systems at both the single-cell and the network levels D.J. Felleman, D.C. Van Essen. ''Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex''. Cerebral Cortex, 1 (1) (1991) using a variety of techniques (in particular,

patch clamp The patch clamp technique is a laboratory technique in electrophysiology used to study ionic currents in individual isolated living cells, tissue sections, or patches of cell membrane. The technique is especially useful in the study of excitabl ...

recordings, intracellular and extra-cellular single and multi-unit

electrophysiology Electrophysiology (from Greek , ''ēlektron'', "amber" etymology of "electron"">Electron#Etymology">etymology of "electron" , ''physis'', "nature, origin"; and , '' -logia'') is the branch of physiology that studies the electrical properties of b ...

in the awake animal and functional brain imaging techniques, such as

functional magnetic resonance imaging Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...

(fMRI)), the theoretical analysis of nervous structures (

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, computer simulations, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to u ...

) and the modeling of artificial

neural networks A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

for engineering purposes. The program started out with a small number of existing faculty in the various divisions. Amongst the early founding faculty were

, David Van Essen, Geoffrey Fox, James Bower, Mark Konishi, John Allman,

Ed Posner Edward Charles "Ed" Posner (August 10, 1933 – June 15, 1993) was an American information theorist and neural network researcher who became chief technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded the Conference on Neural Information Proces ...

and Demetri Psaltis. In that year, the first external professor,

Christof Koch Christof Koch ( ; born November 13, 1956) is a German-American neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for B ...

, was hired. Since 1990, about 110 graduate students have been awarded a PhD in CNS and 14 a MS in CNS. About two-thirds of CNS graduates pursued an academic career, with the remaining CNS graduates founding and/or joining start-up companies. Over this time, the average duration of PhD has been 5.6 years. During this time, the executive officers of the CNS Program were

, Demetri Psaltis,

and Pietro Perona.

Related conferences and workshops

CNS faculty founded and co-founded a number of conferences and workshops: * Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for Computing, in 1984. *

Neural Information Processing Systems The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meet ...

(NIPS) in 1987.
Methods in Computational Neuroscience at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole
in 1988.
The Telluride Summer School in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering
in 1993.

Related academic programs

Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zürich, Switzerland

The Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel

Notable alumni

David J. C. MacKay Professor Sir David John Cameron MacKay (22 April 1967 – 14 April 2016) was a British physicist, mathematician, and academic. He was the Regius Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and f ...

– Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

and chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).
Bruno Olshausen
– Director, Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience,

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

.
Kwabena Boahen
– Professor of Bioengineering,

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. *

Misha Mahowald Michelle Anne Mahowald (January 12, 1963 – December 26, 1996) was an American computational neuroscientist in the emerging field of neuromorphic engineering. In 1996 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame f ...

Erik Winfree Erik Winfree (born September 26, 1969) is an American applied computer scientist, bioengineer, and professor at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher into DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology. In 1998, Winfree in col ...

– Professor,

. *

Laurent Itti Laurent Itti (born December 12, 1970 in Tours, France) is a computational neuroscientist. He received his MS in "Image Processing" from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris in 1994, and a PhD in Computation and N ...

– Professor,

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

. *

Tobias Delbruck Tobias "Tobi" Delbrück (often written Delbruck) (born 1960, Pasadena, California)Faculty p ...

– Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering,

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

. *

Shih-Chii Liu Shih-Chii Liu is a professor at the University of Zürich. Her research interests include developing brain-inspired sensors, algorithms, and networks; and their neural electronic equivalents. Education and career Liu pursued a Bachelor's degree in ...

– Professor at the

University of Zürich The University of Zürich (UZH, german: Universität Zürich) is a public research university located in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 f ...

and co-leader of the Sensors Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics,

References

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External links

Web site of the CNS program at Caltech

California Institute of Technology Neural engineering