Seminar Series

Interdisciplinary Seminar Series
"Structures and Mathematics"

The workshop-seminars aim at initiating interactions between mathematicians and researchers from other sciences. We want to explore in particular questions and problems, which might be of interest to and benefit from the involvement of mathematicians of all sort. The setting of the seminar is informal, and interactive.

Organisers:

Prof. Dr. Anna Marciniak-Czochra, Dr. Andreas Ott, Prof. Dr. Anna Wienhard

Next Meeting:

20.07.2017, 12:00pm Kirchhoff-Institute Lecture Hall 2	Prof. Dr. Fred Hamprecht The quest for the wiring diagram of the brain Poster	.

ABSTRACT:
Understanding the brain is an old and yet-unsolved problem. To understand the workings of a neural circuit, it is possibly required to know its structure, and almost surely necessary to know its connectivity. After great progress in electron microscopy, several labs worldwide are milling away at animal brains and generating what will amount to petabytes of high-quality data. The resulting images are good enough for human tracers to consistently follow at least the majority of neural processes; unfortunately, humans would take thousands of years to complete the task for even the smallest mammalian brain. So the quest is on for computer vision algorithms to do the same automatically and reliably. The current state of the art pipelines recur to deep neural networks and combinatorial graph partitioning problems. The former are notoriously ill understood, the latter still expensive to solve at scale. In this talk, I will sketch the problem, a state of the art approach (which does not quite achieve human accuracy yet), and I will lay out some of the open problems in the field.

Former Meetings:

10.06.2016	Prof. Dr. med. Andreas Draguhn Neuronal ensembles as elementary representations in the nervous system Poster and Abstract
11.11.2015	Dr. Moritz Mercker Pattern formation in biological tissues Poster and Abstract