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5TH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP

NEURAL CODING 2003

Second Call for participation

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HOW TO GET TO AULLA ?

DATES:

Saturday 20 - Thursday 25, September 2003

LOCATION:

Most workshop activities will be located at the Municipio di Aulla (Town Hall) and one session at the Fortezza della Brunella (a Renaissance fortress), recently renewed and hosting the Museo di Storia naturale della Lunigiana (Lunigiana Museum of Natural History).

Please look at the programme for a detailed location of the events.

Aulla (Italy) is located in the northwestern part of Tuscany along the valley of river Magra, in the heart of the Lunigiana.   The surroundings include the Cinque Terre and the marble quarries of the Alpi Apuane.

HOST INSTITUTION AND SPONSORS (preliminary list)

Museo di Storia naturale della Lunigiana (Lunigiana Museum of Natural History).

Città di Aulla (City Council of Aulla)

Dip. Matematica, Università di Torino

SCOPE:

The brain is certainly an endless case study of a complex system characterized by multiple levels of integration with emergent properties. Complexity is observed from the sensory transduction level to the cell assembly dynamics. In order to cope with such seemingly hopeless case study one of the most challenging goal of brain science is understanding how the nervous system codes and processes information. However, this question rests upon the difficult objective to establish an appropriate definition of information which is both physiologically and theoretically plausible.

Scientific thought as we know it today, is based upon the assumption of an objective, external world. This conviction is supported by a rationale which calls upon mechanical laws of causal efficacy and determinism. Fundamentally, it is the correspondence between the hypotheses and their predictions through experimental research that builds the empirical success of Science. Several attempts to crack the neural codes following many reductionnist paradigms have been proposed during the past decades. What is the state-of-the-art of the techniques and models that have been used in the past? Are we facing a dead-end? Should we develop alternatives approaches?

The scope of this workshop is to gather ideas for approaching this subject from different viewpoints, ranging from single neurons and neural networks to animal/human behavior in theoretical and experimental studies and by different disciplines.

This is the fifth International Workshop on Neuronal Coding, after Prague (1995), Versailles (1997), Osaka (1999) and Plymouth (2001). It continues their initial objective to avoid special introductory papers and to promote the discussions and the establishment of contacts among participants.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Almo FARINA (Co-Chairman, Università di Urbino, Italy)

Alessandro VILLA (Co-Chairman, Université de Grenoble "Joseph Fourier", France)

Roman BORISYUK (University of Plymouth, UK)

Guido BUGMANN (University of Plymouth, UK)

Petr LANSKY (Acad. of Science of the Czech Rep., Prague, CZ)

Jean-Pierre ROSPARS (INRA, Versailles, France)

Laura SACERDOTE (Università di Torino, Italy)

Shunsuke SATO (Osaka University, Japan)

PARTICIPANTS:

The Conference room is well suited for a group of 80-90 persons. The List of Participants will be issued later.

GRANTS:

We will not be able to cover the travel costs of participants. Travel grants and reduced registration fee will be available only to registered attendees who present a paper or give a talk at the workshops.
NB: This means that grants will be distributed at the meeting place and all participants are required to register and pay the full fee in advance.
Priority will be given to young scientists and those who can demonstrate financial hardship. The number of such grants will depend on the generousity of our sponsors and we cannot foresee in advance the amount of each grant.

ABSTRACTS SUBMISSION

Only electronic submissions are accepted. Abstracts must be submitted as attached documents to neural-coding-2003@neuroheuristic.Zorg

Please name the abstract file as YOURNAME.rtf or YOURNAME.tex

Please follow the directions in Form C (Abstract Form MS Word .rtf or LaTeX)

PROCEEDINGS

An abstract book will be distributed to the participants.
The full papers will refereed and published as a special issue of an international Journal. For the past meetings the Journal BioSystems published the best presented papers. Submission of a paper for the proceedings is not a prerequisite for participation to the Workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES:

5. Second Call for participation: THIS CALL

4. Submission of your presentation title: April 15, 2003

3. Submission of abstract: May 1st, 2003 (Abstract Form MS Word .rtf or LaTeX)

2. On-time registration fee due: July 1, 2003

1. Notification of Workshop final program: July 15, 2003

0. Workshop dates: September 20-25, 2003

CONFERENCE SECRETARIAT:

Dr. Lucia Simonini - Neural Coding Aulla 2003
Museo di Storia naturale della Lunigiana
Fortezza della Brunella
I-54011 Aulla (MS)
Italy

PHONE: +39-0187-400252
FAX: +39-0187-420727

EMAIL: neural-coding-2003@neuroheuristic.Zorg

CONFERENCE WEB-SITE: THIS SITE

http://www.neuroheuristic.org/neural-coding-2003/

Presenting Authors: please fill

  o  Form A (Registration)
  o  Form B (Accomodation)
  o  Form C (Abstract Form MS Word .rtf or LaTeX)

Attending Participants: please fill

  o  Form A (Registration)
  o  Form B (Accomodation)