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COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE: TRENDS IN RESEARCH 2002
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To order this title, and for more information, click here
By
J.M. Bower, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
Preface & Foreword
The papers presented in this proceedings volume where originally presented at the Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS*01) held in July, 2001 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey, California. All papers were peer reviewed prior to acceptance at the meeting. The papers published here were actually submitted in final format in January of 2002.
Because CNS*01 is the last CNS meeting which I will personally be involved in organizing, I hope the reader will indulge me in a short look back at the last ten years. CNS*01 was, in fact, the 10th in a series of annual events that started with a meeting at the Laurel Heights Conference Center of the University of California San Francisco, July 26-29, 1992. That first meeting, organized by myself, John Miller and Frank Eechman was intended to provide an opportunity for computational neurobiologists to meet once a year to discuss our growing field. In the previous two years, John and Frank had been principle organizers of a very successful workshop on "The Analysis and Modeling of Neural Systems" also held in San Francisco and featuring invited speakers from the many different disciplines coming together to establish computational neuroscience. I myself in prior years had been involved in the founding and organization of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) meetings that had become the yearly flagship event for the best of "neural network" research. While NIPS, and other similarly oriented meetings, maintained open invitations to neurobiologists to participate, John, Frank and I felt that computational neuroscience really needed a meeting of its own, attended by investigators specifically interested in understanding the nervous system for its own sake. At the time this position was somewhat controversial, as the engineers and physicists involved in the neural networks movement felt that a separate meeting would remove some of the justification for their claim that a strong connection existed between neural networks and the organization of nervous systems. In fact, considerable pressure was applied in the early days by funding agencies invested in neural network research, like for example the Office of Naval Research, to merge the fledgling CNS meeting with one or another of those focused on neural networks. A vote of the participants, requested by a funding officer for the ONR at the second CNS meeting in Washington D.C., however, resulted in a unanimous decision not to merge with any neural network meeting. While that vote also lost meeting support from the ONR, the growth and prosperity of the CNS meetings over the next ten years proves without a doubt that our field deserved and has benefited from a separate meeting of its own.
As anyone who has attended a CNS meeting knows, a unique culture has grown up around the CNS meetings that I, as an organizer, have been proud to be associated with. For example, the first and subsequent CNS meetings were explicitly designed to be open to all participants. Our default has always been to accept rather than reject papers, on the grounds that the authors of the less well reviewed papers might even benefit more from presentation of the papers at the meeting than those of the highly reviewed papers. We have also given considerable thought and attention to the paper review process to assure as much fairness and openness as possible. The CNS meeting has also always had elaborate rules governing presentations by members of the organizer's own laboratories or institutions. While institutions with larger numbers of computational neurobiologists usually contribute a larger number of papers, the review and organizing committees have always strived to balance these presentations with those from less well known institutions, or institutions in which fewer investigators are involved in computational studies. As a consequence, it is a source of some pride that over the past 10 years there has been almost none of the bickering and political maneuvering that seemed to be endemic in the neural networks community and that often occurs in science. This was in large part due to the care with which the CNS organizing and review committees have managed the meeting.
The inclusiveness of the CNS meetings has also applied to its attendees. I have been particularly pleased by the number of participants who have journeyed from foreign countries. In any given year as many as 20% of attendees have come from overseas, many from Europe, but also from Asia, South America, Australia and New Zeeland. I have always been particularly impressed by the efforts of those from countries with relatively little funding for foreign travel, like Brazil and Hungary for example, to attend our meetings. The meeting's support and encouragement of non-US participation was explicitly manifest when, for CNS*00, the meeting was held in the beautiful city of Brugge, Belgium. The meeting in Brugge was the largest to date. We were particularly pleased with the attendance of students from Eastern Europe.
Which brings me to what for me has perhaps been the most satisfying feature of these meetings, their emphasis on student participation. At the time the first CNS meeting was organized, almost all meetings in computational neuroscience were invitation only, attended by senior faculty. John, Frank, and I explicitly made the decision to focus the CNS meetings on student participation on the assumption that growth in the field would depend on the education of a new set of researchers. This decision was reflected in the decision, for example, to seek grants and invest meeting funds in travel support for students rather than the travel costs of senior faculty or invited speakers. With critical support from the National Institutes of Health and Mental Health, and from the National Science Foundation, we have been able to offer some travel support to nearly every student requesting support over the last 10 years. As a result many students have attended these meetings who would not otherwise have been able to do so.
The focus on student participation, however, not only involved travel grants, but also the structure of the meeting itself. For example, equal emphasis in meeting organization has always been placed on poster and oral presentations, and, in fact, CNS poster sessions are well known for running long into the night. At three in the morning there is usually at least one custodian each year who can not believe that any scientific subject could keep so many people awake and in active discussion for so long. The meeting's organizers have also never hesitated to give students, some even early in their careers, access to the podium if their work justified the exposure. In fact, I am particularly proud of the number of current computational neuroscience faculty who gave their first major international talk at a CNS meeting. I should also mention that the flip side of our focus on students was our tendency to have relatively few invited speakers. We have also never advertised the meeting based on its invited speakers believing instead that participants should come to the meeting for its own sake. We have also never provided honoraria to invited speakers making this money available for student travel instead. These policy decisions were not intended to devalue or discourage the participation of established researchers, and in fact many have come to the meeting on their own. Instead, these policy decisions reflected our emphasis on the full CNS community and its most vital and important participants, its youngest members.
Another unusual aspect of the CNS meetings has been the effort, from the first, to establish an interesting culture around computational neuroscience. This is perhaps most evident in the posters that advertise the meeting. I am pleased and surprised at how many of our posters now hang in the halls of laboratories and governmental agencies around the world. Once when visiting MIT, I noticed a poster on the wall behind a secretaries desk. As she did not know that I had had anything to do with its design, I remarked that the person that designed the poster must have been pretty strange. Her comment, which I will never forget, was "yes, there is no doubt about that, but boy, that poster sure describes the way it is around here". I turns out that she herself had put the poster on the wall.
Those who have participated through the years also know that the organizers have always strived to assure that everyone has a good time and that the meeting doesn't take itself too seriously. Our banquets are particularly well known. The first year's banquet is actually legendary. Held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, John Miller and I had instructed Frank Eeckman to make sure that the food was up to par for San Francisco. Frank, following our instruction, arranged not only for the best caterer in San Francisco, but also told them to spare no expense and provide as many raw oysters, shrimp, caviar, fancy pastries, and especially "drinks" as anyone wanted. The result, a legendary event, that ran to more than 150 dollars per person (in 1992 dollars!!), and almost cost John Miller his house when we couldn't pay the bill. While we learned the hard way the necessity of watching costs, subsequent banquets at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the historic Hall of the City in Brugge Belgium, Big Sky Resort in Montana, the science museums of Boston and Baltimore, the marine aquarium in San Francisco, and next to the beach in Santa Barbara, all lived up to the precedent set by the first banquet. At the risk of being accused of shameless self-promotion, I would be remiss not to mention the other well-known CNS social event, "Rock Roll and Remember" (in this case, the "remember" most obviously referring to the effort by those attending to try to remember what each song was supposed to sound like). Ramon and the K-halls reconstituted for each of the last 6 meetings, have played in some rather remarkable venues, including a Celtic bar in Brugge, and the 31st Street Pub in Pittsburgh. It is remarkable how many computational neurobiologists have also danced for the first time at a CNS meeting.
As all meeting participants through the last 10 years know well, our success owes in large part to the extraordinary abilities and dedication of the supporters of the meeting, its organizers, and its staff. With respect to overall organization, the meeting would not exist without the vision and insight of John Miller, then at U.C. Berkeley, now at Montana State University. Much of the meeting's structure was invented by John, just as he guided its implementation. I have never found it as easy to work with anyone, and few of my collaborations have been more successful. Special mention should also be made of the importance of the steady support and sage advice from Dennis Glanzman at NIMH. Dennis was involved almost from the start, and from the start recognized the potential importance of this meeting in establishing a solid basis for a new field. Without his support, the meeting would not exist. I wish space allowed me to thank each and every past member of the program committee. Serving for three years, everyone has pulled their weight. I also want to acknowledge our friends at Elsevier Science, and especially Zeger Karssen for their continued support in putting out a fine proceedings volume. After working with 5 different publishers in the first 6 years, Elevier Science has provided a solid, competent and reliable base for these proceedings volumes, which, I believe, represent an increasingly important source of information about what is going on in computational neuroscience.
Anyone that knows me knows that any effort I am involved in requires an enormous amount of effort by those around me. In that regard, I want to mention the first meeting secretary, Chris Ploegaert, who was a rock during the early days of chaos when the organizers were still figuring out how to organize. Ironically enough, Chris's return to the meeting in Brugge is now followed by her efforts to organize CNS*02 and beyond. But of course, the most important acknowledgement must be reserved for Judy Macias, whose tireless enthusiasm, native ability to organize, efficiency and dedication really made these meetings possible. Add in the efforts of her family, Abel, Abel III and we had an unbeatable combination. Judy and I have worked so closely together for these last nine years, that she is no longer replaceable. While I will miss organizing the meeting, I will miss it tenfold because I will no longer be working with Judy. I am really the only one who knows how much of her soul she put into CNS, and how much the turmoil of the last year cost her as a result. I also know, however, that her effort lives on in the careers and lives that the CNS meeting has touched. This volume is therefore dedicated to Judy Macias.
Finally, the CNS meeting rolls on, ably guided by Erik De Schutter and Phil Ulinski, both of whom have already put in years of service to the meeting and know its culture well. This year the meeting will be held for the first time in the great city of Chicago, and the following year the meeting will move back to Europe as part of a now established three year rotation. I am certain that the meeting will get even better under its new leadership and I am personally looking forward to, for the first time, sitting in the audience without having to worry about whether the projector is in focus.
Best to you all.
Jim Bower
Research Imaging Center
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Cajal Neuroscience Center
University of Texas San Antonio
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