program

Last year's program

keynote

Project MindScope

The Allen Institute for Brain Science has initiated a ten year project to study the principles by which information is encoded, transformed and represented in the mammalian cerebral cortex and related structures. The Institute will build a series of brain observatories to identify, record and intervene in the neuronal networks underlying visually guided behaviors in the mouse, including visual perception, decision making and consciousness. This is a large-scale, in-house team effort to synthesize genomic, anatomical, physiological and theoretical knowledge into a description of the wiring scheme of the cortex, at both the structural and the functional levels. I will describe the associated computational and informatics challenges. The fruits of this cerebroscope will be freely available to the public.

Christof Koch, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer, Allen Institute of Brain Science

Born in the American Midwest, Christof Koch grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco, where he graduated from the Lycèe Descartes. He studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany and was awarded his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1982. After four years at MIT, Dr. Koch joined Caltech in 1986, where he is the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology. In 2011, he became the CSO of the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle to lead a large scale, focused and high-throughout, ten year effort to understand coding in the visual neocortex. The author of more than three hundred scientific papers and journal articles, patents and books, Dr. Koch studies the biophysics of computation, and the neuronal basis of visual perception, attention, and consciousness. Together with Francis Crick, with whom he worked for 16 years, he is one of the pioneers of the neurobiological approach to consciousness. His latest book is Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press, 2012).