Category Archive

Journals checked regularly (in no particular order):

Behavioral Neuroscience
Journal of Experimental Biology
Journal of Neurophysiology
Journal of Neurobiology
Journal of Neuroscience
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Neuron
Journal of Computational Neuroscience
Neural Computation
Adaptive Behavior
Artificial Life
PLoS Biology
PLoS Computational Biology
Biological Cybernetics
Nature
Nature Neuroscience
Nature Reviews Neuroscience

For all except the last four I’ve made the link such that if you introduce your Sussex username and password you can not only check the titles but also download the papers. For the last three (yes including Nature!!!) Sussex has no access (and I have to resource to my wife’s password for help!).

By regularly I mean I check the table of content of each of those Journals at least once a month for articles of interest. I dedicate at least half a day per week to browsing through the titles. From this I end up piling up at least 10 new papers to read, of which I end up actually reading only 2 or 3. Hope to improve on this with time. I would particularly like to keep an online record of those that I found interesting with a specific note or two.

Finally, for many of these journals you can give out your mail and they’ll automatically send you the new titles as they come out. I’ve stopped checking them this way because of the ‘passivity’. I ended up checking the titles of the paper when the mail arrived, which most likely are times when I am not 100% up to properly reading them. So I would end up just reading the mail to get it out of the way and never coming back to them. Whereas by actively going to their websites I know I check only when is most appropriate.

So, briefly I’ll see if I can mention at least titles and authors of papers I’ve read or would like to read this week (and do this regularly.. fingers crossed):

Systems level circuit model of C. elegans undulatory locomotion: mathematical modeling and molecular genetics
Jan Karbowski, Gary Schindelman, Christopher J. Cronin, Adeline Seah and Paul W. Sternberg

Evolving a Neural Model of Insect Path Integration
Thomas Haferlach, Jan Wessnitzer, Michael Mangan, and Barbara Webb

The neuronal dynamics underlying cognitive flexibility in set shifting tasks
Anja Stemme, Gustavo Deco and Astrid Busch

Role of Nitric Oxide in Classical Conditioning of Siphon Withdrawal in Aplysia
Igor Antonov, Thomas Ha, Irina Antonova, Leonid L. Moroz, and Robert D. Hawkins

Multiple Memory Traces for Olfactory Reward Learning in Drosophila
Andreas S. Thum, Arnim Jenett, Kei Ito, Martin Heisenberg, and Hiromu Tanimoto

Capitalizing on cortical plasticity: influence of physical activity on cognition and brain function
Arthur F. Kramer and Kirk I. Erickson

Programmable springs: Developing actuators with programmable compliance for autonomous robots
Bill Bigge and Inman R. Harvey

Autonomous and fast robot learning through motivation
M. Rodríguez, R. Iglesias, C.V. Regueiro, J. Correa and S. Barro

Chained learning architectures in a simple closed-loop behavioural context
Tomas Kulvicius, Bernd Porr and Florentin Wörgötter

Developmental learning for autonomous robots
M.H. Lee, Q. Meng and F. Chao

Sensory adaptation
Barry Wark, Brian Nils Lundstrom and Adrienne Fairhall

Homeostatic signaling: the positive side of negative feedback
Gina Turrigiano

Learning to hear: plasticity of auditory cortical processing
Johannes C. Dahmen and Andrew J. King

Consistent dynamics suggests tight regulation of biophysical parameters in a small network of bursting neurons
Attila Sz�cs, Allen I. Selverston

Please let me know if I’m missing certain Journals that you think might be relevant. Also let me know if you have an overall strategy that works for you.

I have come across a couple of academic places that are hosting podcasts for their seminars. I have listenned to a couple of them and have found really useful. It’s an idea that we should definitely bring into our labs. Here’s my first attempt. It is not yet a podcast as such, just videos online. I have had several problems while recording, it is not as simple as it sounds. There are problems with the sound and video. I also have to figure out the rights. Takashi suggested creative commons where some rights are reserved, but I know very little about this. Any suggestions are welcome. This is all temporary.

I’ve managed to connect to the vex kit from my Mac and download programs using both easy C and regular C code. There are a couple of ‘tricks’ involved, so I have written the steps that I went through in as much detail as I could here.

It is likely that there are better, faster, more efficient, ways of doing this. But for the moment it should do the job.

I’m experimenting with a website where I hope to keep as many of the talks and meetings that I attend to. Some of which may be of relevance to people working on related issues. For reasons of size, I made the video as low quality as I could and I also cut out much of the discussion that went after the talk. I’m open to feedback about whether the video should be of better quality, etc. Thanks to Bryan for the interesting talk and for allowing me to put it online.

Note: All was done using what the MacBook Pro comes with (i.e. built-in camera and mic, iMovie and iWeb) - no extra hardware or software was used. No skills were needed either.

Allow me to give you a brief summary of how the couple of last days have gone for me.

-1. playing with huge-6G-video files to create a video podcast and eventually ‘run dangerously low on disk space’
0. try erasing the big files lying around my disk
1. next morning the computer doesn’t start. just before getting to the login screen it sends me to a text-only full-screen console. I can login and access my data but that’s about it. Read the rest of this entry »