Computational Navigation: Lessons from the Rat

A Rice/UTHSC-H joint effort to build a biophysically and anatomically accurate computational model of the rat hippocampal formation with which to evaluate existing, and construct novel, cognitive theories of spatial navigation.

Senior Personnel: Steve Cox, Jim Knierim, Harel Shouval, Paul Smolen, and Danny Sorensen.

Funding: We are pleased to acknowledge the generous support of the Sheafor/Lindsay Fund via the ERIT program at Rice's Computer and Information Technology Institute CITI .

Courses: Intro at Rice/Baylor . Advanced at UTHSC-H

Activities:
Spring 08 Seminar: VIGRE, CAAM 499 Sec 1. Tuesday 4-6pm in HZ 119
Fall 07 Seminar: VIGRE, CAAM 499 Sec 1. Wednesday 10-11am in DH 3110
Summer 07 Work
Spring 07 Seminar: VIGRE, CAAM 499 Sec 1. Wednesday 5-6pm in KH 101
Fall 06 Seminar: VIGRE, CAAM 499 Sec 1. Wednesday 5-6pm in KH 105
Summer 06 Work
Spring 06 Seminar: VIGRE, CAAM 499 Sec 1.

Code

Resources



Spring 08 Seminar Participants: Chris Conner, Jay Raol, Tony Kellems, Derrick Roos, Jim Wang, Eva Dyer, Paul Smolen, Michell Bettelheim, Katherine Ward.

+ Janaury 22: Derrick will step us through his final cell assembly project. If time remains Cox will follow up with an overview of Volman et al.



Fall 07 Seminar Participants: Chris Conner, Jay Raol, Tony Kellems, Derrick Roos, Charlie Peck, Jim Wang, Darren DeFreeuw, Eva Dyer, Paul Smolen, Michell Bettelheim, Katherine Ward.

+ August 29: Cox, Introduction to Cell Assemblies. Harris et al. and supplement. Background reading by Scott

+ September 5: Charlie Peck, Palm Reading.

+ September 12: Tony Kellems and Jay Raol Palm Reading.

+ September 19: Derrick and Darren Palm Reading.

+ September 24: Chris Conner. Return to Harris et al.

+ September 26: Tony Kellems. Harris supplement.

+ October 3: Jay Raol. Harris supplement. Exact gradient and Hessian.

+ October 10: Jay and Tony. Harris supplement.

+ October 17: Jay and Tony. Harris supplement.

+ October 24: Cox. The thesis of Fransen.

+ October 31: Roos: The single cell models of Fransen.

+ November 7: Conner: The learning rule of Fransen via Lansner and Ekeborg

+ November 14: DeFreeuw and Conner: More on Lansner and Ekeborg

+ November 21: Cox: More on Lansner and Ekeborg. Small example with working code.

+ November 28: All: Large examples from Lansner and Ekeborg.

+ December 5: All: Large examples from Lansner and Ekeborg and (clean copy of) Lansner and Fransen



Spring 07 Seminar Participants: Paul Anzel, Chris Conner, Sam Feng, Ray Hwong, Toby Isaac, Neel Kishan, Brad Peercy, Jay Raol, Manivel Rengasamy, Francesco Savelli, Nick Stepankiw, Nan Xiao

+ January 10: Cox, on a Fast Network Solver of Rangan and Cai. Overview and explicit solution of the conductance equation.

+ January 17: Raol, on the Low mobility of Ca buffers in axons Gabso, Neher and Spira.

+ January 24: Cox, Resume Rangan and Cai. Approximate solution of the voltage equation and Algorithm 8.1.

+ January 31: Cox, Resume Rangan and Cai. Networks and Spike-Spike Correction via algorithm 9.1. code.

+ February 7: Chris Conner

+ February 14: Paul Smolen, UTH

+ February 21: Sam Feng

+ February 28: Toby Isaac. PETSc Intro
PETSc and CA3
Summer 06 work

+ March 7: Brad Losavio, BCM, Non-linear synaptic summation in dendrites.

+ March 14: Jay Raol, Calcium Imaging

+ March 21: Giri Kalamangalam, Clinical Epilespsy and Computational Neuroscience

+ March 28: Tony Kellems, Integrate and Fire

+ April 4: Steve Cox, Localization of Potassium Currents Schaefer, Helmstaeder, Sakmann and Korngreen

+ April 11: Chris Conner, Spike sorting

+ April 18: Model Reduction Lall, Marsden and Glavaski



Fall 06 Seminar Participants: Paul Anzel, Chris Conner, Sam Feng, Ray Hwong, Toby Isaac, Neel Kishan, Brad Peercy, Jay Raol, Manivel Rengasamy, Francesco Savelli, Nick Stepankiw, Nan Xiao

+ September 6: Cox and Feng. Calcium Signaling and Inverse Problems.

+ Septmeber 13: Kellems and Isaac. CA3 models.

+ September 20: Cox and Feng. Adjoint Methods via the notes of Matthias Heinkenschloss.

+ September 27: Jim Knierim. Lab/modeling Overview.

+ October 4: Chris Conner. Spike Discrimination.

+ October 11: Sam Feng. Computing the Hessian of the misfit function.

+ October 18: Nan Xiao. The branched cable equation and the finite element method.

+ October 25: Tony Kellems. Accurate solution to Integrate and Fire models.

+ November 1: Paul Smolen.

+ November 8: Toby Isaac. PETSc survey.

+ November 15: Toby Isaac. Extended Pinsky-Rinzel nets on PETSc



Summer 06 Work Groups:

Network: Computation and Visualization
(2C) Toby Isaac, Richard Hall
(IaF) Nick Stepankiw,
Tony Kellems
(Pop) Jay Raol

Knierim Lab, UTH: Data recording and analysis
Chris Conner

Neuronal Calcium Signaling
With Cox and Saggau at BCM: Sam Feng, Nan Xiao, Ray Hwong,
Resources: Saggau , Parker 1 Parker 2 Parker 3
Summer poster , Summer Sam and Ray report
With Peercy at Rice: Lucca Sabbatini



Spring 06 Seminar Participants: Paul Anzel, Sha'kia Boggan, Andy Bost, Jesse Chan, Sam Feng, Toby Isaac, Neel Kishan, Brad Peercy, Jay Raol, Francesco Savelli, Nick Stepankiw, Nan Xiao

+ January 11: Cox. Specify project goals and introduce Samsanovich and Ascoli
Assignment Due 1/19. One page summary of introductory chapter on The Neurobiology of Spatial Behavior.

+ January 19: Cox. The Pathfinding Algorithm of S&A. Review theta rhythm and phase precession. Discuss their code. This is a very high level representation - for there don't appear to be any neurons in sight. One challenge is to build neuronal nets that in fact exhibit theta waves and phase precession. Chapter 7 in Traub and Miles is a great place to start. Beyond that, for theta I recommend this paper of Wang and for phase precession this paper of Magee. These notions are brought together in an Integrate & Fire paper of Tsodyks et. al that exploits the experimental findings of Skaggs et. al.
Assignment Due 1/26. Build a bigger (at least 10-by-10) maze and suppress the interactive aspect of samasc.m and wrap it in a driver that produces a histogram like S&A figure 3C. Submit hard copies of code and histogram. You might like the hist command in matlab. At this early phase you may not work together. Ask Cox and/or Peercy for help.

+ January 26: Brad Peercy. Putting neurons into the maze. A careful look at theta waves and phase precession as discussed in the above papers of Skaggs et. al and Tsodyks et. al.

+ February 2: Andy & Jesse. Mechanisms that lead to asymmetry in Tsodyks may come from Head Direction and or Grid cells.

+ February 9: Neel & Sha'Kia. Integrate and Fire nets in C and MPI on the Rice Terascale cluster.
Assignment Due 2/16. Two page summary of Wang .

+ February 16: Toby will lead discussion of rythmogenesis in the CA3 model of Pinsky and Rinzel.

+ February 23: Sam will lead discussion of rythmogenesis in the CA3 model of Traub and Miles. Here are notes on the prologue and chapter 5 and chapter 6 .

+ March 2: Moser speaks at UTH (MSB 3.001) on Grid Cells. Meet at the (Non-Magregor) stop light on the jogging path between Sid & Lovett at 3:40 pm.

+ March 9: Jay will lead discussion of An effective kinetic representation of fluctuation driven neuronal netwoks.

+ March 16: Spring Break and, more importantly, Brain Awareness Week.

+ March 23: Sam will discuss chapters 6 and 7 of Traub and Miles. Raol and Cox will counter with a population model of Nykamp and Tranchina

+ March 30: Cox and Raol continue the disection of Nykamp and Tranchina.

+ April 6: Spring recess, poster prep.

+ April 13: Cox and Raol continue the disection of Nykamp and Tranchina. The CA3 population model of the Budapest group is comprised of Part 1 and Part 2.


Code:

+ Single Cell Solver and Viewer by Nan Xiao
Background Reading
gzipped tar ball of matlab code
To unpack type tar -xvvf nxball.tar.gz from Unix prompt.
To run type cellscript_act from matlab prompt.

+ Parallel Integrate and Fire Code by Tony Kellems PIAF

+ The Pinsky & Rinzel CA3 network of Chan & Isaac


Resources:

+ Cray XD1
+ Rice Terascale Cluster Home
+ The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map by O'keefe and Nadel.
+ GCC for Theoretical & Computational Neuroscience
+ Duke Southampton Archive of Neuronal Morphology
+ Rice Baylor Archive of Neuronal Morphology
+ Computational Neuroanatomy of the Hippocampus
+ Levy Lab at UVa.
+ Budapest Computational Neuroscience Group
+ NeuroJet