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 graduate 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. He previously received his degree in Biology from Caltech in 2006.

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.

Antje Ihlefeld is a psychoacoustician and neural engineer with a keen interest in how the brain processes sound. Currently a Research Associate at Boston University, she works on aspects of normal hearing, hearing impairment and cochlear implant hearing, as well as computational modelling of auditory perception. She was trained at the University of Technology, Dresden, Germany, where she studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate, at Boston University, where she received a PhD in cognitive and Neural Systems, and at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge/UK where she worked as postdoctoral scientist with cochlear implant listeners. For more information, visit her website.

Florian studied Computer Science as major and Electrical Engineering as minor subject at the University of Ulm in Germany and finished with a diploma degree in 2006. Afterward he obtained a scholarship from the Graduate School ‘Mathematical Analysis of Evolution, Information, and Complexity’ at the University of Ulm and graduated with a doctor degree in 2010. By March 2010 he joined CELEST as a research associate to continue work on biologically inspired modeling of motion processing for visual navigation.

Blaise Mouttet was a former US Patent Examiner and assisted in the formation of the US patent classification scheme covering nanotechnology. He has an MSEE focusing on nanomaterials and semiconductor devices from George Mason University and has given presentations related to the memristor at the 1st Memristor and Memristive System Symposium at UC Berkeley in 2008 and at ISCAS 2010 in Paris, France.