October 27, 2017
Dr. Zhongming Liu, a member of the Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience (PIIN) and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering recently published in the scientific journal, Cerebral Cortex. “The Neural Encoding and Decoding with Deep Learning for Dynamic Natural Vision.” The findings represent the first time such an approach has been used to see how the brain processes movies of natural scenes, a step toward decoding the brain while people are trying to make sense of complex and dynamic visual surroundings. The advance could aid efforts to improve artificial intelligence and lead to new insights into brain function. A YouTube video is available at https://youtu.be/Qh5_uMGXl1g. In addition to publication in the scientific literature, these findings were reported in over 38 media outlets including Science Daily (readership: 5 million) and The Economics Times (readership: 800,000). According to Dr. Liu this work benefits greatly from PIIN, through which extensive collaboration and discussion have been fostered. As a follow-up on this work, multiple faculty members in PIIN including Drs. Alex Chubykin, Amy Brewster, Jenna Rickus and Donna Fekete have recently submitted an application for major NIH funding.
