Hi everyone,

This week Dr. Chris Eliasmith will be giving Tuesday's talk, at 4:30 pm in MC4061. The title is "How to build a brain: from single neurons to cognition".

Abstract: Theoretical neuroscience is a new discipline focused on constructing mathematical models of brain function. It has made significant headway in understanding aspects of the neural code. However, past work has largely focused on small numbers of neurons, and so the underlying representations are often simple. In this talk I demonstrate how the ideas underlying these simple forms of representation can underwrite a representational hierarchy that scales to support sophisticated, structure-sensitive representations. I will present a general architecture, the semantic pointer architecture (SPA), which is built on this hierarchy and allows the manipulation, processing, and learning of structured representations in neurally realistic models. I demonstrate the architecture on Progressive Raven's Matrices (RPM), a test of general fluid intelligence.

We will also be holding an installment of our Unix tutorials: Unix 102. It will be on Wednesday, October 13, at 4:30 pm in MC3003. Unix 102 is a follow up to Unix 101, requiring basic knowledge of the shell. If you missed Unix 101 but still know your way around you should be fine. Topics covered include: "real" editors, document typesetting with LaTeX (great for assignments!), bulk editing, spellchecking, and printing in the student environment and elsewhere.

To wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving, there will be a ham and mustard in the office for lunch on Tuesday, first come first serve.

Finally, for those of you who follow this sort of thing, the clang compiler has reached 'production ready' status for C++, so on Tuesday we'll be heading to Kickoff in the plaza for a pint or two. Hang around the office in the evening, if no one is there go straight away to Kickoff.

As usual, if you have any questions check out the website http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ or e-mail the executive: exec@csclub.uwaterloo.ca