Neuroscience

thesamovar — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 18:46:20 +0000

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the field of theoretical neuroscience. I'm currently a member of the Equipe Audition, part of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, in the Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), France. I'm funded by Spikehear, a European Research Council grant.

Research Interests

I am interested in neural mechanisms underlying computations performed by the brain. In particular, I'm interested in understanding spike-timing based codes and computation. At the moment, I'm trying to understand how neural synchrony can be used to perform sound localisation (see below).

Projects

Brian

"Brian" is a software package for simulating spiking neural networks. Specifically, it is a package for the Python programming language providing functions and classes designed to make writing simulations of neural networks as easy and flexible as possible. See Brian's web page.

The most recent release of Brian added the model fitting toolbox for automatic fitting of spiking neuron models to electrophysiological recordings. For the next releases, we are focussing on a new library, Brian Hears, for auditory modelling, and on running Brian on GPU chips (inexpensive massively parallel processors available in consumer graphics cards).

Sound localisation

Sound localisation is the ability of many animals to determine to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy the direction from which a sound is coming. I am working on a neural model of this ability using synchrony, coincidence detection, and spike-timing dependent plasticity. The hope is that this will throw light on the computations performed by real brains (in particular, localisation not just in the horizontal plane), learning (in particular, to account for our ability to learn to localise sounds after a change in head or ear shape such as happens during development), and also provide effective new algorithms to localise sounds in the presence of distractors, noise, reverberations, etc.

Publications

Goodman, D. F. M., & Brette, R. (2010). Learning to localise sounds with spiking neural networks. NIPS (accepted) [provisional pdf]
Goodman, D. F. M. (2010). Code generation: a strategy for neural network simulators. Neuroinformatics (accepted) [provisional pdf]
Rossant, C, Goodman, D. F. M, Platkiewicz, J, & Brette, R. (2010). Automatic fitting of spiking neuron models to electrophysiological recordings. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. doi:10.3389/neuro.11.002.2010
Goodman, D. F. M, & Brette, R. (2009). The Brian simulator. Frontiers in Neuroscience 3(2), doi:10.3389/neuro.01.026.2009
Brette, R., & Goodman, D. (2009). Brian: a simple and flexible simulator for spiking neural networks. The Neuromorphic Engineer. doi: 10.2417/1200906.1659
Goodman, D., & Brette, R. (2008). Brian: a simulator for spiking neural networks in Python. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 2(5), doi:10.3389/neuro.11.005.2008.

Presentations and Posters

Spotlight presentation of poster on "Learning to localise sounds with spiking neural networks" at NIPS, Vancouver (December 2010)
Co-author of presentation given by Cyrille Rossant on “Playdoh: a lightweight Python library for distributed computation and optimisation” at EuroSciPy (July 2010)
Tutorial on Brian (via Skype) at Telluride in Colorado (July 2010)
Talk on "Computation with spikes" at Mathematical Neuroscience, Edinburgh (April 2010)
Poster on sound localisation at Mathematical Neuroscience, Edinburgh (April 2010)
Tutorial on Python and Brian at Neurocomp in Bordeaux, France (September 2009)
Tutorial on Python and Brian at the Python in neuroscience workshop at CNS, Berlin (July 2009)
Poster on sound localisation at CNS, Berlin (July 2009)
Presentation on Brian at the Gatsby computational neuroscience unit, London (July 2009)
Presentation on sound localisation at The Ear Institute, London (July 2009)
Presentation on sound localisation at CerCo , Toulouse, France (Jan 2009)
Presentation on Brian at software interoperability workshop at CNS, Portland OR, USA (July 2008)
Poster on Brian at CNS, Portland OR, USA (July 2008)
Tutorial on Brian at "Using Python in computational neuroscience" workshop in Freiburg, Germany (June 2008)
Presentation on Brian at Visiontrain meeting in Malmo, Sweden (May 2008)
Presentation on Brian at Facets CodeJam 2 in Gif-sur-Yvette, France (May 2008)
Poster on Brian at the Mathematical Neuroscience Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland (March 2008)

Other

Reviewer for Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, Neural Computation and the Journal of Computational Neuroscience.
Designed the front cover of the May 2010 issue of Neuron (right, click for higher resolution version), featuring Agus et al.'s "Rapid Formation of Robust Auditory Memories: Insights from Noise".