【レポート】
The 12th Dynamic Brain Forum (ICCN 2009)

The second international conference on cognitive neurodynamics (ICCN2009) was hold in Hangzhou, China from November 15 to November 19, 2009. It was quit large conference (about 300 researchers from over 10 countries) and covered several topics about cognitive neuroscience, such as theoretical modeling, physiological experiments, fMRI studies in human, and so on. The conference set 7 plenary lectures for all participants and 13 divided subtopics, including
1) Neural dynamics of brain disorders;
2) Emerging technologies for brain computer interfaces;
3) Firing oscillation and pattern in neuronal networks;
4) Multiscalar neurodynamics - from physiology to system theory;
5) Tamagawa-RIKEN dynamic brain forum;
6) Neural coding and realistic neural network dynamics;
7) Population dynamics;
8) Brain imaging, EEG, MEG;
9) Sensory dynamics;
10) Action and global cognitive function;
11) Neural computing;
12) Cognitive function disorder and other applications;
13) Various dynamics in biological networks.
The researchers from different fields joined together to discuss and share their results, methods, ideas, and so on.

Specially, ICCN2009 invited several leading scientists in the world to give plenary talks. For example, Dr. Shun-ichi Amari gave a talk titled "Dynamics of learning in hierarchical model--singularity and Milnor attractor". In his lecture, Dr. Amari proposed several fundamental theoretical problems related to learning in a hierarchical network: how to reach the global stable state of the network; which learning method is the optimal one, and so on Dr. Barry J. Richmond gave a presentation of "Stochastic modeling of neural responses". His mathematical neural model can predicted the variation and stochastic properties of neuron's firing, which help us to understand the information process in single neuron. Dr. Ichiro Tsuda gave a lecture of "Chaotic dynamic, episodic memory, and self-identity". In his lecture, Dr. Tsuda introduced his chaotic memory system, specially related to the hippocampus, that encodes episodic memory. He proposed a neural network that can realize self-identity, and the hippocampal network may be involved in this function. This is a great idea; one of important functions of the brain is self-identity. Self-identity may be also a critical feature to distinguish between biological organism and Robert or artificial intelligence. But till now there are very few theoretical models or experimental results to show how the brain realize the function of self-identity. Dr. Walter J Freeman and other speakers also gave very interesting lectures. Besides those plenary lectures, ICCN2009 gave each presenter enough time to show results and extensive discussion. On November 17, I had 40-minute-talk titled "category inference and prefrontal cortex" in the Tamagawa-RIKEN dynamics brain forum. I got some comments and suggestions for my future research. I think it was a successful conference.

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