Computational Approaches to Memory and Plasticity - a great insight into neuroscience

I had the opportunity mostly thanks to Dr. Upinder S.Bhalla and Subhasis Ray to attend a 2-week-long course on neuroscience, more particularly on how memory is formed and what are the methods to computationally model this process. I'm staying in India at NCBS, where the conference took place, for more 3 weeks; at the moment I'm working in Upi's lab to optimize MOOSE by implementing some GPGPU code.

Photo taken at campus of NCBS - such greenery.

CAMP schedule

Just in a nutshell.. on the first two days we had some remedial classes on dynamical systems, neuroscience and Python programming - with the exception of the last one I really needed them. They were quite informative, and so to say my entrance to neuroscience. Great computational modeling tutorials were held introducing cable theory, Brian, MOOSE, NEURON and many models implemented in them. During the day talks were held by researchers working in various areas within neuroscience - we had some insight in these areas and by the end of the first week we had to decide what project we intended to do in the next week. I'm going to talk about my and my fellow CAMPer's choice in another post. At night we usually had some official or unofficial discussion in the presence of some cans of beer.

After course

After the course I spent one week with travelling around South-India with the bunch I met at the conference. We visited some temples (don't really remember the names), went to Hampi, rented some motorbikes and rode all over the place. Also we ate unbelievable good meals at the local vegetarian restaurant - now I'm considering becoming a veg.

At an arbitrary temple with my travelling fellows.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience getting to know so much kind and utmost intelligent personality, not to mention knowledge I gained from the lectures. I mean, I don't remember if I had any this sort of intensely great time before in my life. The only thing I cannot understand (still), why they're not able to remove the bones from the meat before cooking in India :D