Mikio Aoi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego with a joint appointment in Neurobiology and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute
Seminar Information
Unlike many other modalities of sensory processing the organizational logic of the olfactory system is yet to be understood. This is surprising as the gross anatomical structure of the olfactory system is remarkably conserved across the tree of life. However, new connectomic data describing the entire connectome of the fly brain offers new opportunities to understand this logic. In this talk I describe our recent work to this end as well as new metrics for the analysis of data dimensionality and representational similarity, which we developed for this analysis.
Mikio Aoi is a computational neuroscientist and an Assistant Professor at UCSD, jointly appointed between the Department of Neurobiology and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. He studies how populations of neurons coordinate their activity to determine the representational and algorithmic functions of neural computations. In particular, his interests are in understanding how the specifics of neural computations impact behavior and in developing principled approaches to data analysis for this purpose. Before pursuing neuroscience he earned a PhD in Mathematical Biology from North Carolina State University studying the dynamics of cerebrovascular function in stroke and diabetes. He served as a postdoc in the Department of Mathematics at Boston University developing methods for studying rhythmic synchrony in electrophysiological measurements and at Princeton University developing scalable methods for analyzing neuronal population dynamics.