The human body has developed efficient mechanisms for distributing information throughout the body, with the brain providing central coordination. The communication between these different areas is mediated through stimulation of neurons in the body. The Signals, Information, and Algorithms Lab is interested in understanding how information is encoded and managed by the brain and the way such encoding is matched to the characteristics of the underlying propagation medium and the ultimate response mechanism. Research in this area will lead to important advances in both basic neuroscience and the associated biomedical applications. In addition, such knowledge is likely to suggest new paradigms for engineering efficient systems for non-biological applications.
The tasks faced by living organisms in extracting and encoding information from multiple sources, and subsequently distributing the resulting signals in a complex heterogeneous propagation environment are similar to kinds of functionality required of modern systems and networks in engineering. Despite the ubiquity of such systems and networks and several decades of research, we still know surprisingly little about the fundamental limits of such manmade networks, nor what fundamental design principles they imply. By investigating the methods evolution has led to in structuring such networks in living organisms, we expect to learn more about what may be the right architectural principles for designing engineering systems. Such research requires close interaction with experimentalists to develop meaningful models and analysis.
Just one example of a class of questions that would be important to understand include the relationship between stimulus and the joint firing patterns of collections of neurons in the different parts of the brain and nervous system in particular, what aspects of the stimulus are important, how the stimulus is in turn encoded into such firing patterns, and how the associated neurons are selected. Recent advances in measurement instruments and other experimental apparatus are beginning to enable such investigations.