NeuroMathComp

Responsable : Olivier Faugeras

Adresse : Hauts du DI (3ème étage - escalier A) . 45, rue d´Ulm \\ INRIA, 23 avenue d'Italie 75214 Paris Cedex 13

Activities

NeuroMathComp is a joint project team between INRIA (Méditerranée and Rocquencourt), École Normale Supérieure de Paris (Département d'Informatique), Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis (JAD Laboratory) and CNRS (LIENS, UMR 8548. LJAD, UMR 6621). It started in 2009 as a follow-up of the Odyssée project team.

Neuromathcomp focuses on the exploration of the brain from the mathematical and computational perspectives. We want to unveil the principles that govern the functioning of neurons and assemblies thereof and to use our results to bridge the gap between biological and computational vision. Our work is quite mathematically oriented but we make heavy use of computers for numerical experiments and simulations. We have close ties with several top groups in biological neuroscience. We are pursuing the idea that the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" can be brought, as it has been in physics, to bear on neuroscience.

Computational neuroscience attempts to build models of neurons at a variety of levels, microscopic, i.e. the minicolumn containing of the order of one hundred or so neurons, mesoscopic, i.e. the macrocolumn containing of the order of 10⁴-10⁵ neurons, and macroscopic, i.e. a cortical area such as the primary visual area V1.

Modeling such assemblies of neurons and simulating their behaviour involves putting together a mixture of the most recent results in neurophysiology with such advanced mathematics as dynamic systems theory, bifurcation theory, probability theory, stochastic calculus, and statistics, as well as the use of simulation tools..

The group is very much interdisciplinary, working at the border of computer science, neuroscience, and mathematics. The École Normale Supérieure de Paris and INRIA are traditionnally institutions that strongly support interdisciplinary research at the highest level of excellence. The results of the NeuroMathComp group contribute to push forward the state of the art in the new discipline of mathematical and computational neuroscience.

Bio-inspired models for action recognition: