Introduction to computational neuroscience
Master course, The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, ICTP, 2024
Introduction to computational neuroscience
I gave this 20 hours course from 2020 to 2024 in the Postgraduate Diploma Programme in Quantitative Life Sciences at ICTP as an independent senior postdoc.
I also gave this course in the 2024-25 academic year as a visiting professor. The course was supplemented by a section on Evolution on Neural Systems by Alessandro Treves from SISSA.
Main topics
- Neural dynamics
- Biophysics of neural excitability (Hodgkin-Huxley model)
- Stochastic models of spike generation
- Generalized IF models
- Mean-field analysis of population dynamics
- Neural coding
- Analysis of spike trains
- Neural encoding models and GLMs
- Methods in computational neuroscience
- Linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction
- Boltzman machines
- Neural computation
- Learning algorithms for recurrent neural networks (Reservoir computing, FORCE, BPTT)