Symposium 2012
Welcome
Registration is closed, but feel free to stop by the symposium.The second annual student-led IGERT Neuroengineering Symposium, to be held on June 28th, 2012, is a one day event is designed to highlight the growing neuroengineering presence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In addition, we hope that the symposium will expose students, faculty, and guests to neuroengineering work being pioneered across the country. The symposium will highlight three key areas of neuroengineering: audio information processing, neuro-imaging, and brain-computer interfaces. Each of these areas will feature short presentations from University of Illinois faculty and one-hour presentations by invited speakers. An extended lunch break will showcase demonstrations from some of the University of Illinois laboratories, tours of a selection of Beckman Institute facilities, and a student poster session. This symposium is an open event; we are excited to welcome any and all who have an interest in neuroengineering or related fields.
Latest News
About
Neuroengineering as a discipline is still very young- journals devoted to it were first published less than ten years ago. The emerging discipline of neuroengineering, or neural engineering, seeks to understand, enhance, and interface with neural systems. By incorporating knowledge from various fields ranging from neurology to robotics, this discipline aims to bridge the gap between computers and living organisms. Neuroengineering has huge potential to benefit humanity; neuroengineers hope to attach neurally controlled limbs, create augmented realities, develop new experimental and clinical tools for neurologists, and fundamentally change the way people interact with the surrounding world.
Neuroengineering is interdisciplinary by nature. With interdisciplinary work becoming increasingly more common, researchers are realizing that important new areas of scientific research are emerging at the interfaces of conventional disciplines. Through the National Science Foundation's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is educating the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers in both neuroscience and engineering. This blend of disciplines, neuroengineering, has the potential to impact society not only by advancing neuroscience and engineering but may also result in new areas of medicine and in the production of new consumer products altering the way people interact with the everyday world. The interdisciplinary background acquired by the students in the IGERT nueroengineering program will allow them to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with neuroscientists and engineers alike.
To highlight cutting edge neuroengineering achievements and showcase the collaborative work being produced by Neuroengineering IGERT students at the University of Illinois, we are hosting the university's first annual IGERT Neuroengineering Symposium. On June 16th, 2012, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will welcome experts in the fields of auditory information processing, neuroimaging, and brain-machine interfaces in an exposé of the current state of neuroengineering. By gathering to review and discuss the current advances in neuroengineering, we will have an opportunity to foster collaborations across academic networks, and to reach beyond the conventional limits of our disciplines.
Motivation
The 2012 Neuroengineering IGERT Symposium will provide an opportunity for IGERT students, graduate students, undergraduate students, and faculty alike to participate in a forum for the communication of ideas in the emerging field of neuroengineering. This symposium will provide a unique and invaluable educational and research experience for students and faculty, bringing speakers and students from peer institutions to the University of Illinois campus to share cutting-edge research. This symposium will develop not only students' technical knowledge, but hone their professional and personal skills.
Overall, the goal of the National Science Foundation's IGERT program is to prepare scientists for the challenges of working in a multidisciplinary world. By encouraging truly interdisciplinary education, the IGERT program seeks to educate researchers with deep knowledge in their chosen disciplines, breadth in interdisciplinary fields, and the professional and personal skills to become leaders and creative agents for change. As a part of the IGERT program, the National Science Foundation encourages schools to provide opportunities for the communication of ideas and to foster collaboration. The 2012 Neuroengineering Symposium is an excellent opportunity to further the educational goals of the University of Illinois and the IGERT program.
Benefit to Students
As the artist Henry Hartman once said, "Success always comes when preparation meets opportunity." University of Illinois students are some of the best prepared in the nation for future careers in industry and academics. As these students' peers, colleagues, and fellow Illini, our job is to provide the right opportunities for their preparation to meet with success. During our symposium, we want University of Illinois students to develop connections and collaborations with invited speakers, faculty, and fellow students. Additionally, we hope to introduce students to a wealth of cutting-edge research, expanding their knowledge beyond the classroom. In particular, the laboratory tours, technical demonstrations, poster session, and reception will allow students to connect with each other and explore exciting new research directions. We hope that, even if students do not develop active collaborations from this event, the symposium will broaden students' horizons and allow them to view their own work in a new light.
Objectives and Impact
The main objective of this symposium is to create a forum for students, faculty, and guests to meet and learn from each other. By bringing together diverse laboratories from across campus, our proposed symposium aims to exploit the strengths of the myriad of research programs at the University of Illinois. Given the interdisciplinary nature of Neuroengineering, the interaction between people across campus and across institutions is absolutely critical. Our goal is to give participants the opportunity to forge new relationships by taking them out of their laboratories, away from their computers, and exposing them to new ideas.
Schedule
| Time | Event | Description |
| 8:15AM Beckman 1003 |
Breakfast/Registration | |
| 8:45AM Beckman 1005 |
Opening Remarks | |
| 9:00AM Beckman 1005 |
Mark Hasagawa-Johnson (Audition) | |
| 10:00AM Beckman 1005 |
Charles Larson (Audition) | |
| 11:00AM Beckman 1005 |
Lunch and Poster Session | |
| 1:00PM Beckman 1005 |
David Van Essen (Imaging) | |
| 2:00PM Beckman 1005 |
Jack Gallant (Imaging) | |
| 3:00PM Beckman 1005 |
Lab Tours | |
| 4:00PM Beckman 1005 |
Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Viventi (BCI) | |
| 5:00PM Beckman Atrium |
Closing Remarks |
Speakers
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIUC
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (Fellow, ASA; Senior Member, IEEE and ACM; Associate Editor, JASA and LabPhon) is an Associate Professor of ECE, with an office in the Beckman Institute, and affiliate appointments in the Departments of Speech and Hearing Science, Computer Science, and Linguistics. His work on landmark-based speech recognition was the subject of two summer research workshops at the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing (2004 and 2006). His work on multimedia analytics was the motivation for a working group meeting at the 2011 meeting of the National Visual Analytics Center in Maryland. He is author or co-author of 35 journal articles and 170 conference papers; scholar.google.com lists 1369 citations of his work.
Charles Larson - Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern
Chuck Larson and his lab study the neural mechanisms controlling the voice and the larynx. They have found that when people hear their own voice through earphones, and when the voice pitch through the earphones is unexpectedly changed upwards or downwards, people automatically adjust the pitch of their voice. This phenomenon indicates that there is a close coupling between the auditory system's monitoring of voice and the motor system for adjusting the laryngeal system for voice output. Our recent research has focused on the brain mechanisms underlying the interaction between auditory feedback and voice control. We use EEG and fMRI techniques along with connectivity modeling to identify the timing and interactions between the various brain locations involved in these processes.
David Van Essen - Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, WashU
The Van Essen lab uses neuroimaging approaches combined with novel methods of computerized brain mapping and neuroinformatics to explore the functional organization, connectivity, development, and evolution of cerebral cortex in humans and nonhuman primates. The Human Connectome Project (HCP; http://www.humanconnectome.org/) involves a large-scale collaborative effort to chart long-distance connectivity and its variability in healthy adult humans. Our contribution to the HCP includes the development and application of analysis methods for characterizing brain connectivity, and the development of a user-friendly platform for data mining of the HCP datasets that will be made freely available to the neuroscience community.
Jack Gallant - Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley
Jack Gallant is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, and is affiliated with the graduate programs in Bioengineering, Biophysics, Neuroscience and Vision Science. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and did post-doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology and Washington University Medical School. His research program focuses on constructing quantitative computational models that accurately describe how the brain represents information during natural tasks, and how these representations are modulation by attention. One interesting application of this computational modeling approach is to decode information in the brain in order to reconstruct mental experiences. Because this computational framework can be used to understand and decode brain activity measured by different methods and in different modalities, it has many potential applications in science and technology.
Jonathan Viventi - Center for Neural Science, NYU
Jonathan Viventi is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and an Assistant Professor of Neural Science at New York University. Dr. Viventi earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.Eng. and B.S.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. Dr. Viventi's research applies innovations in flexible electronics, low power analog circuits, and machine learning to create new technology for interfacing with the brain at a much finer scale and with broader coverage than previously possible. He creates new tools for neuroscience research and technology to diagnose and treat neurological disorders, such as epilepsy. Using these tools, he collaborates with neuroscientists and clinicians to explore the fundamental properties of brain networks in both health and disease. His research program works closely with industry, including filing five patents and several licensing agreements. His work has been featured as cover articles in Science Translational Medicine and Nature Materials, and has also appeared in Nature Neuroscience, the Journal of Neurophysiology, and Brain. Dr. Viventi has received several awards for his work, including the Mahoney Institute of Neurological Sciences / Neuroscience Graduate Group Flexner Award for Best Neuroscience Thesis at the University of Pennsylvania, Solomon R. Pollack Award for Best Thesis in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Nano/Bio-Interface Center Graduate Research Award for Best Graduate Research on Nanotechnology Applied to Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Poster Session and Reception
Poster Session - An opportunity for students to showcase their own work, the poster session will allow participants to openly interact with one another. Some of the great advantages of this session include the opportunity for students to see related work in a new light, discuss the application of methods both within and across fields, and discover shared research interests.
Photos and Videos
Organizational Committee
Faculty
Program Coordinator
Students
Sponsors
NSF IGERT ECE Trust Fund Medical Scholar Program Graduate College Department of Bioengineering Department of Psychology Beckman Institute Neuroscience Program Student Organization Resource Fund (SORF)Directions to Conference
The 2012 UIUC Neuroengineering Conference will be held at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, which is located at:Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
405 North Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801 USA
Tel: (217) 244-1176 | Fax: (217) 333-2922
For additional information on how to get to the Beckman Institute, please see the Beckman Institute's directions page.
