Total immersion on Evo Devo at BCBT2014!

Jon Kaas shows cortical homologies in different mammalian brains
Date: 
Monday, 2014, September 15
Image: Jon Kaas shows cortical homologies in different mammalian brains.
 
Evolutionary and Developmental aspects of nervous systems and behavior are the themes addressed at BCBT2014
 
BCBT is a two-week annual international summer school that promotes a shared system-level understanding of the architecture of the brain and its possible emulation in artificial systems. http://bcbt.upf.edu/bcbt14
 
This year the school hosted about 60 people between students and senior scientists from UK, Spain, Italy, France, Rumania, Germany, Austria, Greece, USA, India, and Jamaica. The participants attended lectures, tutorials and worked on projects all. The atmosphere of the BCBT summer school is informal with the goal to stimulate in-depth discussion. The last day of the school is dedicated to the presentation of the student projects with a final award ceremony.
The School program was chaired by Paul Verschure (UPF, Barcelona) with Tony Prescott (Univ. Sheffield, UK), Leah Krubitzer (UC Davis, USA) and Anna Mura (UPF, Barcelona).
During the 1st week of the school the BCBT program addressed the evolutionary and developmental aspects of nervous systems and behavior with world experts in comparative neuroanatomy, brain development and behaviour such as Jon Kaas, Leah Krubitzer, Zoltán Molnár, Henry Kennedy, Gary Marcus, Randall D. Beer. The 2nd week included in depth lectures on memory and decision making by prominent researchers such as Stefano Ferraina, David Redish and John Lisman. A Road mapping session on the Convergent Science Network took place with the goal to come to an overview of the field, its challenges and opportunities in Europe. 
The BCBT summer school is part of a series of events organized by the Convergent Science Network of Biomimetics and Neurotechnology and is positioned at the interface between biology and future and emerging technologies with an emphasis on the principles underlying brains and their translation to avant-garde technologies. BCBT caters to students and researchers involved in projects that are in the ambit of “BIO-ICT convergence”, "Brain Inspired ICT", “Cognitive systems-robotics”.
 
The 2014 edition of BCBT is the 7th year of the summer school, which has ran with great success in previous years thanks to an excellent line-up of outstanding speakers (see bcbt.upf.edu ) for previous editions of the school). BCBT lectures are available online (see http://csnetwork.eu/) as well as the CSN Podcast interviews with many of the BCBT speakers.
BCBT is hosted by the group SPECS at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and is supported by the European FP7 Future and Emerging Technologies coordination action Convergent Science Network of Biomimetic and NeuroTechnology
 
For more information write to bcbt [at] upf [dot] edu
 
 Image: BCBT Students group picture