PhD students and PostDocs on this Auditory mailing list might be interested in applying to study this summer at the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Cognition Workshop. It is a three-week long **working** workshop, covering many aspects at the intersection of neurophysiology and engineering.
The Telluride Auditory group has had a lot of success over the years, pioneering some of the first work on online EEG decoding, as well as many other results in auditory (speech and music) perception, attention, learning and machine learning. You too, if selected, can join us. We usually have about 6 faculty and perhaps 10 students working collaboratively on a range of topics.
The exact work we do depends on who attends, and how the experiments go. But we are starting with this list.
We plan to introduce three new projects that build upon our decoding tools.
The first project concerns implicit (or statistical) learning of music and language. In this project, we shall utilize advanced computational models of music and speech sequences (based on Markov chains or DNN’s) to characterize the rate and the extent of learning that humans experience upon passive exposure to new music or language. We shall use EEG recordings to “predict” novel material and determine from the prediction accuracy or deviations how much and the exact nature of the acquisition that has taken place. Our goal in Telluride will be to develop the necessary decoding algorithms and tools to accomplish this task, and then hope to exploit them further after the workshop.
The second project concerns the acquisition of auditory-motor associations. This project will build upon our previous but unsuccessful attempt years ago at decoding of “imagined” speech and music. We have learned a lot since, and so in this round we will record EEG from subjects listening to a sentence, speaking it silently, and speaking it loudly. The musical equivalent will be to play a well-practiced piece on a silent keyboard, versus listening to the music and playing it loudly. We shall use the recordings to determine whether there are close correspondence between the recordings in the three conditions, and specifically, whether the silent speech and music induce similar patterns of activation to the pure listening conditions.
The third project concerns categorical perception of sound. Here we will attempt to decode neural signals while subjects perceive the same sounds while being categorized in totally different contexts. The goal is to see if there are correlates of categorical perception that we can tap into. For example, listening to the same words while we classify them as coming from a male or female in one context, or whether they share the same meaning in another context. Do the words that share the same category evoke a similar signature response to allow us to guess the category from the EEG?
No matter what we'll do we'll have a lot of fun, do some cool science, and hopefully demonstrate some effects that haven't been seen before. One measure of success for the workshop is how many papers we put out in the following year based on new collaborations from among the institutions in attendance.
Please join us.
Details below.
- Malcolm, Mounya and Shihab
P.S. We'll have EEG equipment onsite, courtesy of BrainVision, and will get fNIRS, if there is interest.
Dear all,
We are accepting applications to the 2019 Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop. The Workshop has been running for over 20 years, and has been influential in shaping the field of neuromorphic engineering and serving as a forum connecting across disciplines such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive science, machine learning, robotics, computer vision, signal processing, and electrical engineering. The theme of the 2019 workshop will be on Embodied Learning and Intelligence.
The four topic areas for this year's workshop are:
Understanding the auditory brain with neural networks.
Machine common sense:
Controlling dynamical systems.
Neuromorphic systems for high speed sensorimotor integration, cognitive planning and control.
Important Dates:
Application Website Open - 28th Jan, 2019
Application Close - 29th March, 2019
Notification of Acceptance - 15th April, 2019
Best
Telluride Organizing Team