MSL906A Understanding AI-enabled Computational Neuroscience

The brain is a complex organ, and technology for measuring it is getting really sophisticated. While many foundational questions in neuroscience are already answered (“Does activity in the visual cortex increase when the light turns on?”), more nuanced and specific questions are becoming increasingly important (“Do neurons fire in a specific temporal sequence and does this depend on stimulus features?”), particularly in terms of how optimal learning theorizations occur. Neuroscience data analyses are moving away from simple one-size-fits-all analyses toward custom-tailored analyses, which , in turn, require custom-tailored code. As experiments and analyses get more complicated, point-and-click software tools will impose stronger limits on the experiments one can do and the analyses one can perform.

This course will introduce students to the foundations of AI-enabled computational neuroscience using MATLAB. The vast majority of neuroscience data are stored as matrices, which is one of the reasons why MATLAB is so useful for neuroscience analyses.