Wednesday, April 18, 2007

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

Simulating a 10¹¹ (human brain sized) nervous system

Speaker: Eugene M. Izhikevich, Ph.D.

About the program: I will describe what it takes to simulate a brain model that has the size of the human brain - 10¹¹ (one hundred billion) neurons and almost 10¹⁵ (one quadrillion) synapses. The simulation consists of a detailed model of thalamocortical system with 6-layered cortical structure and 3 thalamic nuclei. It has 18 neuronal cell types with anatomical arrangements corresponding to the striate cortex of cats. Simulation of 1 second of the model took 50 days on a cluster of 27 computers. I will describe what we learned from it and what we need to proceed further.

About the Speaker: Eugene M. Izhikevich is a Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA. He has published dozens of papers and two books on nonlinear dynamics of neurons. Eugene is the editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence and Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, both hosted by http://www.scholarpedia.org

Time/Place: Wednesday April 18 (the 3^rd Wed of April), 6:00 P.M. Lockheed Martin, 4770 Eastgate Mall San Diego, California 92121. Food served starting at 6:00 p.m., talk will begin sharply at 6:30. Directions and lecture background materials available at the SD CIS website. http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/san_diego/cis/

Reservations/Information: Andrew Diamond (IEEE CIS San Diego Chapter Chair) (858) 509-3115, adiamond@EnvisionSystemsLLC.com