CCN Seminar - Filip Vercruysse (École Polytechnique de Lausanne)

Tuesday Jul 5, 2022, 1:30 PM → 3:00 PM America/New_York

4th Floor Classroom/4-Simons Foundation (160 5th Avenue)

Please welcome our CCN Seminar guest speaker Filip Vercruysse, Ph.D. from École Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). Please note that the lecture will be 1 hour, and the remaining 30 minutes will be left for Q&A. Zoom credentials below for those tuning in remotely!


If you are interested in scheduling any 1:1 meetings with Filip, please reach out directly to Matthew Turner at mturner@flatironinstitute.org


Title: Self-organization of a doubly asynchronous irregular network state for spikes and bursts

Abstract: Cortical pyramidal cells (PCs) have a specialized dendritic mechanism for the generation of bursts, suggesting that these events play a special role in cortical information processing. In vivo, bursts occur at a low, but consistent rate. Theory suggests that this network state increases the amount of information they convey. However, because burst activity relies on a threshold mechanism, it is rather sensitive to dendritic input levels. In spiking network models, network states in which bursts occur rarely are therefore typically not robust, but require fine-tuning. Here, we show that this issue can be solved by a homeostatic inhibitory plasticity rule in dendrite-targeting interneurons that is consistent with experimental data. The suggested learning rule can be combined with other forms of inhibitory plasticity to self-organize a network state in which both spikes and bursts occur asynchronously and irregularly at low rate. Finally, we show that this network state creates the network conditions for a recently suggested multiplexed code and thereby indeed increases the amount of information encoded in bursts