Bernstein Conference for Computational Neuroscience 2024

On September 29th, we boarded a train headed to Frankfurt with two posters to present at the annual Bernstein Conference for Computational Neuroscience. The conference started with two days of workshops, where we dipped in and out of sessions to catch interesting talks on dendritic computations by Spiros Chavlis, neural diversity by Ann Kennedy, and many others.

The main conference started on Monday afternoon with a welcome address and several keynote talks. Kyra presented her poster during the first session; she received a lot of interest from fellow retina researchers and people interested in our new software libraries for neural simulations, Jaxley and Jaxley-mech.  This was followed by the second session of talks and dinner together with many colleagues from the Macke lab who were also attending the conference. 

The second main conference day started off with several keynotes and contributed talks. Many of the talks addressed the traditional question of how to reduce the dimensionality of data collected from neural systems, but some talks introduced more unconventional topics such as the importance of single spike timing, how episodic memories are encoded considering spatial location, and how the distribution of mitochondria in neurons can be used to understand synaptic plasticity. The talks were followed by two back-to-back poster sessions where Jonas presented his work on using probablistic numerical methods to infer parameters in Hodgkin-Huxley models. His poster prompted interesting discussions about gradient-based optimization of HH parameters. The poster session was followed by a few more talks and the conference dinner which lasted until very late at night. Too bad, since Mark Churchland was scheduled to give the first talk the next morning, so six hours of sleep had to do. 

The morning had more notable talks including one by Jakob Macke on "Building mechanistic models of neural computations with simulation-based machine learning" which featured some of our work, and one by Susanne Schreiber on how tuning of single HH neurons can have dramatic effects on the dynamics of the whole network.

Overall, it was really great to experience the state of computational neuroscience research and put some faces behind many of the 'Surname et al.'s we see in the literature.