Shiro Usui, RIKEN Brain Science Institue, Japan Title: PLATO project: a collaborating platform of whole visual system modelling

Abstract: To understand the details of brain function, a large scale system model that reflects anatomical and neurophysiological characteristics needs to be implemented. Though numerous computational models of different brain areas have been proposed, its integration for the devel- opment of a large scale model have not yet been accomplished because these models were described by different programming languages, and mostly because they use different data formats. This paper introduces a platform for a collaborative brain system modeling (PLATO) where one can construct computational models using several programming lan- guages and connect them at the I/O level with a common data format. As an example, a whole visual system model including eye movement, eye optics, retinal network and visual cortex has been developed. Preliminary results demonstrate that the integrated model successfully simulates the signal processing flow at different stages of the visual system.

Bio Sketch: Shiro Usui received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974 and became a research assistant at Nagoya University. He moved to Toyohashi University of Technology in 1979 as a lecturer, and has been a professor since 1986. In 2003, he moved to RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako Japan as a Head of Neuroinformatics Laboratory and also the Director of Neuroinformatics Japan Center in 2007. His research interests are neuroinformatics, computational neuroscience and physiological engineering in vision science. He is the authors of Neuroinformatics, Mathematical Models of Brain and Neural Systems and several others. He was the President of the Japanese Neural Network Society for 2005 and 2006, and a Fellow of the IEEE and the IEICE.