ANC Seminar - Sander Keemink
Tuesday, 12th September 2023
Using tight balance to compute: keeping spiking networks quiet, robust, and useful
Abstract: The cortex is widely believed to operate in a regime of balanced excitation and inhibition --- resulting in sparse and irregular spiking activity patterns. In contrast, most spiking neural networks applied in machine learning and neuromorphics appear to be in an excitation driven regime with highly dense and regular spike patterns. Networks that live more in a balanced regime have classically been harder to do computations with. In this talk I will go over a series of investigations into how spiking neural networks that live in a regime of tight balance allow for robust and stable functioning, including a range of computations. Thanks to the tight balance regime the networks remain highly interpretable and designable. The work presented will range from dendritic modelling to applications on hardware, and is of interest both for engineers looking to apply spiking neural network algorithms, and neuroscientists looking for fundamental theories of computation and biologically realistic activity.
Bio: Sander Keemink is an assistant professor in computational neuroscience at the AI department of the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, Netherlands. With a background in computational neuroscience (originally obtained through a PhD), they are interested in intuitive and in-depth understanding how neurons and networks thereof perform computations. While it is now possible to train and build highly effective networks of spiking neurons, this does not always mean we understand them. This hampers our interpretation of what neural networks are really doing, which is not something desirable for a technology seeing such increasingly widespread use.
In between their PhD at the ANC (at the van Rossum lab), and their current position at the Donders, Sander did another Post-Doc at Edinburgh (in the Rochefort lab) and at the Champalimaud institute in Lisbon (in the Machens lab).
Event type: Seminar
Date: Tuesday, 12th September
Time: 11:00
Location: G.07
Speaker(s): Sander Keemink (Dr Keemink, S.W. (Sander) | Radboud University (ru.nl))
Chair/Host: Arno Onken