ANC Workshop - Robbie Court, Hancong Wu

Tuesday, 7th February 2023

Prosthetic control beyond the laboratory - Hancong Wu

Abstract: The research advancements in upper-limb prosthetics in the past decade have not yet benefited prosthetic users in clinical practice. Although many advanced prosthetic control algorithms achieved outstanding performances in the in-lab studies, limitations of hardware and user support make them difficult to deploy in real-world scenarios. In this talk, I will present a model to bridge the gap using the Internet of Things (IoT) and tiny machine learning (TinyML). A prototype has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of performing neural-network-based prosthetic control on a low-cost embedded device with real-time device maintenance through the internet.

Virtual Fly Brain—An interactive atlas of the Drosophila nervous system - Robbie Court

Abstract: As a model organism, Drosophila is uniquely placed to contribute to our understanding of how brains control complex behavior. Not only does it have complex adaptive behaviors, but also a uniquely powerful genetic toolkit, increasingly complete dense connectomic maps of the central nervous system and a rapidly growing set of transcriptomic profiles of cell types. But this also poses a challenge: Given the massive amounts of available data, how are researchers to Find, Access, Integrate and Reuse (FAIR) relevant data in order to develop an integrated anatomical and molecular picture of circuits, inform hypothesis generation, and find reagents for experiments to test these hypotheses? The Virtual Fly Brain (virtualflybrain.org) web application & API provide a solution to this problem, using FAIR principles to integrate 3D images of neurons and brain regions, connectomics, transcriptomics and reagent expression data covering the whole CNS in both larva and adult. Users can search for neurons, neuroanatomy and reagents by name, location, or connectivity, via text search, clicking on 3D images, search-by-image, and queries by type (e.g., dopaminergic neuron) or properties (e.g., synaptic input in the antennal lobe). Returned results include cross-registered 3D images that can be explored in linked 2D and 3D browsers or downloaded under open licenses, and extensive descriptions of cell types and regions curated from the literature. These solutions are potentially extensible to cover similar atlasing and data integration challenges in vertebrates.

Event type: Workshop

Date: Tuesday, 7th February 2023

Time: 11:00

Location: G.03

Speaker(s): Robbie Court, Hancong Wu

Chair/Host: Arno Onken