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

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

in 1986 with the goal of training PhD 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 1 May 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

Nobelist The Nobel Prizes (, ) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make outstanding contributions in the f ...

John Hopfield John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American physicist and emeritus professor of Princeton University, most widely known for his study of associative neural networks in 1982. He is known for the development of the Hopfield network. ...

, 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 recreating 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. He is best known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of t ...

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 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 Cell isolation, isolated living cells, tissue sections, or patches of cell membrane. The technique is especially useful in the st ...

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

electrophysiology Electrophysiology (from ee the Electron#Etymology, etymology of "electron" ; and ) is the branch of physiology that studies the electrical properties of biological cell (biology), cells and tissues. It involves measurements of voltage change ...

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 mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand th ...

) and the modeling of artificial

neural networks A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either Cell (biology), biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a netwo ...

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

Christof Koch Christof Koch ( ; born November 13, 1956) is an American cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He was the president and chief scientist of the All ...

, 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 Pietro Perona (born 3 September 1961) is an Italian-American educator and computer scientist. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology and direct ...

. The current executive officer is Thanos Siapas.

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. Along with ICLR and ICML, it is one of the three ...

(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 of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

.
Kwabena Boahen
– Professor of Bioengineering,

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. *

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 – Professor,

. * Laurent Itti – 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 ...

. * Tobias Delbruck – Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering,

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

. *

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 Zurich (UZH, ) is a public university, public research university in Zurich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of the ...

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

.
Maneesh Sahani
– Director
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

References

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External links

Web site of the CNS program at Caltech

California Institute of Technology Neural engineering