This week, the Math/Stats Colloquium is proud to feature our own Nida Kazi Obatake (MS Math) giving one of the best-titled colloquia of all time, “Rat GPS: Drawing Place Field Diagrams of Neural Codes Using Toric Ideals”.  A rat has special neurons that encode its geographic location.  These neurons are called place cells and each place cell points to a region in the space, called a place field.  Neural codes are collections of the firing patterns of place cells.  In this talk, we investigate how to algorithmically draw a place field diagram of a neural code, building on existing work investigating neural codes, ideas developed in the field of information visualization, and the toric ideal of a neural code.

Background: Students of all backgrounds are welcome.  Abstract algebra is encouraged, but certainly not required.

• Date: Wed May 04
• Time: 3-3:50pm
• Room: MH320
• Snacks: 2:30pm in MH331B

For more information, click here to see the full flyer, suitable for printing and posting.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming events:

• Wed May 11: Slobodan Simic, SJSU
  “Topology and physics”