Mark van Rossum 's Webpage

Reader at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Research Summary 

My research area is computational neuroscience. I use computational and mathematical techniques to understand the working of the brain. I hope that, like in physics, it will be possible to find simple underlying principles of the brain's functioning.
My particular interests are:

• Synaptic plasticity:  Synaptic plasticity is thought to underly memory formation in the nervous system. I'm researching the computational consequences of realistic, spike timing dependent plasticity rules. In particular, the stability of memory and homeostasis have my current interest.
  One particular project is about synaptic tagging and capture.

• Noise in neural systems: The nervous system has  extrinsic and intrinsic noise sources. From an engineering point of view this leads to the question, how does the nervous system deal with this noise. It turns out that the noise might be beneficial in some cases. More precisely, noise prevent synchronization (which reduces information content) and allows for fast and accurate propagation of signals.
  

• The early visual system: The COLAMN project was a major UK project that tries to create a full computer model of primary visual cortex using detailed information about its anatomy and physiology, leading us towards the principles of neural computation and ultra efficient hardware implementations.

• The retina: Together with Rob Smith, I made a model of the rod-rodbipolar synapse. This is the first synapse in the visual pathway and is important at very low light levels. In order to preserve signal quality, a special thresholding is required at this synapse. Some very good data on this system were recently measured. Together with Paul Clark I have extended the theory. We have also created a very realistic model of a ganglion cell with takes all known noise sources explicitly into account.
  

Former labs: 

Students

Group

Phd-Students (in our program all students have 2 supervisors)

MSc students/ UG students / visitors

Former members

Computer code:

Computer tips
Varia