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-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [rseminars] Upcoming Research Seminars - Week 4 Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:31:06 +0100 From: Helen Fagan helen.fagan@york.ac.uk To: rseminars-l@ohm.york.ac.uk

Point-process analysis of neural signals: from frequency coding to temporal coding Monday 21st October, 1pm Speaker: Dr Luca Citi (University of Essex) Location: PL002 Synopsis:

The first part of the talk will show an application of neural decoding for the purpose of controlling a robotic hand prosthesis. In this case the so-called "frequency coding" paradigm was used, which assumes that the neural information is encoded in the firing rate of individual neurons. In the second part, a powerful statistical framework, point processes, will be introduced. Among other applications, point processes have successfully been used for neural decoding, giving access to the so-called "temporal coding" which assumes that the actual time of the spikes carries valuable information in addition to that carried by the rate alone. An application of this method to a functional neuro-muscolar stimulation system will be presented.

*Biography:*

Dr Luca Citi received a degree in Electronic Engineering in 2004 from the University of Florence, Italy. He did his master's thesis as a visiting student under Riccardo Poli's supervision at the Essex Brain-Computer Interfaces group. In 2005, he enrolled in a PhD program at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (Italy) with a thesis about the decoding of neural signals for the control of robotic arm prostheses. He then spent three years as post-doc at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on statistical analysis of point processes (stochastic processes representing discrete events in time) applied to heartbeat series and neural spike trains. He is currently a Lecturer in Computational Intelligence at the University of Essex.