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Workshop: Stochastic Models of Behaviour
Canada - Vancouver/Whistler

Hosted by: Aldo Faisal & Marta Gonzales (NIPS 2008)
Venue: NIPS conference
Dates: Dec 12, 2008 through Dec 13, 2008

Call for Posters: 2008-10-01 through 2008-12-01
Event Registration: 2008-10-01 through 2008-12-13
Early Registration Deadline: 2008-11-01
 
Description
 
Advances in experimental methods have increased the availability, amount and quality of behavioural data for both humans and animals. Yet most studies lack adequate quantitative methods to model behaviour and its variability in a natural manner. Thus, a major challenge in analyzing behavior is to discover some underlying simplicity in a complex and highly variable stream of actions. The gain of such an analysis is that the underlying simplicity is often a reflection of the mechanism driving behavior. In this workshop we will explore and discuss how to model behaviour
found across many scales of biological organization: From the travel patterns of people, tools making behaviour, to modeling simple organisms, such as bacteria, worms, insects - with the ultimate aim to relate genes and neural circuits to behaviour.

Thus, two major questions emerge:
1. How can we describe and quantify behavior such that its variability is reflected in a tractable manner?
2. What can we infer from such models of behaviour about the underlying mechanisms?

We believe that advanced statistical and probabilistic methods (in which the NIPS conference has been traditionally at the forefront of developments) can be used to analyze the unconstrained natural statistics of behaviour. This approach offers a principled route to extract relevant features of behavioural performance and compare individual animals in a more objective manner than using highly constrained experiments. Moreover these models can be generative in nature providing us with an objective measure to distinguish between observed behaviours.

Scope:
The selection of talks is aimed at stimulating ideas and get discussions started between the participants on how to combine state-of-the-art machine learning techniques with existing behavioral approaches to develop a "Bio- informatics of Behavior".

Organizing committee:
Aldo Faisal, University of Cambridge
Marta C. Gonzalez, Northeastern University

Confirmed, invited speakers
Nathan Eagle (Santa Fe Institute/MIT)
Aldo Faisal (University of Cambridge)
Tony Jebara (Columbia University)
Marta C. Gonzales (Northeastern University)
Greg Stephens (Princeton)

Workshop and poster-session:
This 1-day workshop session (talks) will serve to get us going on various approaches towards the two big questions. There will be plenty of opportunities to interact in small groups prior and after to the main session. Participation is open to all. Participants are encouraged to present their work in the adjoining poster-session (abstract submissions open).

Note: We very much encourage the participation of experimentally-oriented colleagues working on quantitative data sets of human, animal or bacterial behaviour and who are interested in collaboration or inspiration in application of these models.
 
Additional Information
 
Event URL: http://nips.cc/Conferences/2008/Program/event.php?ID=1050
ISCB Member Discount: None
Contact Person: Aldo Faisal & Marta Gonzales ([javascript protected email address])

While ISCB provides for conference and event listings that may be of interest to members and bioinformaticians at large, ISCB is not responsible for the content provided by outside sources. Such listings are not meant as an endorsement by ISCB.



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