Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Neural Coding And Decoding, Alexander Dimitrov

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Methods based on Rate Distortion theory have been successfully used to cluster stimuli and neural responses in order to study neural codes at a level of detail supported by the amount of available data. They approximate the joint stimulus-response distribution by quantizing paired stimulus-response observations into smaller reproductions of the stimulus and response spaces. An optimal quantization is found by maximizing an information-theoretic cost function subject to both equality and inequality constraints, in hundreds to thousands of dimensions. This analytical approach has several advantages over other current approaches:

• it yields the most informative approximation of the encoding scheme given the …

Aging-In-Place Research At Orcatech: Making Sense Of The Data, Tamara Hayes

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

The Oregon Center for Aging and Technology (ORCATECH) seeks to facilitate successful aging and reduce the cost of healthcare by establishing the evidence base for technologies supporting aging-in-place research and care. This is done through pilot studies evaluating the role of the technologies, as well as large longitudinal studies in which sensors are placed in the homes of community-dwelling elders to monitor daily patterns of activity, walking speeds, medication adherence, and other behaviors. These sensors collect continuous data that reflect normal variability in behaviors as well as trends that may indicate problematic changes in cognition or mobility. Because data are …