Derek James: “Derek is interested in the evolution and function of brains. His previous work focused on evolving artificial neural networks, and he co-authored ANJI, a Java implementation of NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT). He graduated with a BA from The University of Texas at Austin, and is currently a PhD student at The Institute of Cogntive Science at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where his current work focuses on developing a model of how sequences might be learned and processed in an unsupervised way using biologically-inspired neuron models and learning rules.

Ethan Meyers: My research right now focuses on using/developing neural population decoding methods to better understand what information is contained in higher level visual areas and how this information is coded in the activity of neurons.

Tim Barnes: Tim is a PhD. student in Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. He is currently researching the interaction of the visual cortex and related brain areas in primates to further understand how depth perception arises from moving objects. Motion can define boundaries between textured regions. The same kinds of motion can also make one region look closer than another, which depends on the movement of the boundary originally created by that same movement. Using the 3D FORMOTION model as a base for computer simulations, he hopes to make progress in understanding the relative roles of known visual motion phenomena (motion parallax, kinetic occlusion, figure-ground segregration) in seeing the structure of the world from motion information alone.

Robert Thijs Kozma is a senior at Boston Univeristy, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). He is a pure and applied mathematics major at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He has received the prestigeous Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) award to conduct research on self-dual elliptic curves and coding theory at Boston University. He is on the Dean’s List and he is a CAS College Scholar for the 2009-2010 academic year. His mathematical interests include non-Euclidean geometries, algebraic geometry, partial differential equations, and nonlinear dynamical systems. He is the sectretary of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Boston University Student Chapter. Robert is a laboratory assistant and programmer at the Cognitive Neural Systems Technology Lab, Boston University. He is involved in projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) SyNAPSE and by the NSF Centers for Excellence in Learning programs.

Anne van Rossum is a researcher at Almende B.V. in the Netherlands. He has a BSc. in Electrical Engineering, and a MSc. in Media and Knowledge Engineering at the Technical University Delft. Anne’s research interest are artificial intelligence, modular robotics and sensor networks; more specific, self-organized neuroscientific and evolutionary-inspired control and sensor fusion software. Such as gene regulatory networks, associative memory, neural multi-agent systems, global workspace theory.