CNS*2025 Florence

Title: Population activity : the influence of cell-class identity, synaptic dynamics, plasticity and adaptation.

Organizers: 
Michele GIUGLIANO (co-organizer)
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Dipartimento di Scienze Biomediche, Metaboliche e Neuroscienze sede ex-Sc. Biomediche - Italy
michele.giugliano@unimore.it

Simona OLMI (co-organizer)
Institute for Complex Systems - National Research Council - Italy
simona.olmi@fi.isc.cnr.it

Alessandro TORCINI (co-organizer)
Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modélisation - CY Cergy Paris Université- Cergy-Pontoise, France
alessandro.torcini@cyu.fr

Abstract:
In recent years tremendous developments have been achieved in the comprehension of neural activity at the population level. This has been possible on one side thanks to the new investigation methods recently developed (e.g. the neuropixels probes and large-scale imaging) that allows for the contemporary registration of the activity of (tens/hundreds of) thousands of neurons in alive and behaving mice as well as established dynamic-clamp protocols.
On the other side by the elaboration of extremely refined mean field models able to describe the population activity of spiking neural networks encompassing realistic biological features, from different forms of synaptic dynamics to plastic and adaptive aspects present at the neural level.
The aim of this workshop is to gather neuroscientists, mathematicians, engineers, and physicists all working on the characterization of the population activity from different point of views, ranging from data analysis of experimental results to simulations of large ensembles of neurons, from next generation neural mass models to dynamical mean field theories. This workshop will favour the exchanges and the discussion on extremely recent developments in this extremely fluorishing field.

Key Words : Neuropixels probes; neural mass models; Fokker Planck formulation; dynamical mean field theory; short- term and long-term plasticity; excitatory and inhibitory balanced networks; spike frequency adaptation

Program:
July 8th -- Room 4
9:15-9:30 Opening
9:30-10:00 Anna Levina (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Talk title: "Balancing Excitation and Inhibition in connectivity and synaptic strength"
10:00-10:30 Giacomo Barzon (Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova, Italy)
Talk title: "Optimal control of neural activity in circuits with excitatory-inhibitory balance"

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-11:30 Eleonora Russo (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, The BioRobotics Institute, Italy)
Talk title “Integration of rate and phase codes by hippocampal cell-assemblies supports flexible encoding of spatiotemporal context”
11:30-12:00 Tobias Kuehn (Institut de la Vision, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, INSERM)
Talk title: "Discrete and continuous neuron models united in field theory: statistics, dynamics and computation"
12:00-12:30 Gianluigi Mongillo (Sorbonne Université, INSERM, CNRS, Institut de la Vision, F-75012 Paris, France)
Talk title: “Synaptic encoding of time in working memory”

July 9th -- Room Hall 1A
9:30 - 10:00 Magnus J.E. Richardson (Warwick Mathematics Institute, UK)
Talk title: "Spatiotemporal integration of stochastic synaptic drive within neurons and across networks"
10:00-10:30 Gianni Valerio Vinci (Istituto Superiore di Sanita’, Rome, Italy)
Talk title: "Noise induced phase transition in cortical neural field: the role of finite-size fluctuations"

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-11:30 Simona Olmi (Institute for Complex Systems - National Research Council - Italy)
Talk title: “Relaxation oscillations in next-generation neural masses with spike-frequency adaptation”
11:30-12:00 Ferdinand Tixidre (CY Cergy Paris University, France)
Talk title: "Is the cortical dynamics ergodic? A numerical study in partially-symmetric networks of spiking neurons"
12:00-12:30 Letizia Allegra Mascaro (Neuroscience Institute, National Research Council, Italy)
Talk title: "State-Dependent Large-Scale Cortical Dynamics in Neurotypical and Autistic Mice"

12:30-14:00 Lunch break

14:00-14:30 Alessandro Torcini (CY Cergy Paris Université- Cergy-Pontoise, France)
Talk title : “Discrete synaptic events induce global oscillations in balanced neural networks"
14:30-15:00 Rainer Engelken (Columbia University, NY, United States)
Talk title:"Sparse Chaos in Cortical Circuits: Linking Single-Neuron Biophysics to Population Dynamics"
15:00-15:30 Tilo Schwalger (Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Mathematik, Germany)
Talk title: "A low-dimensional neural-mass model for population activities capturing fluctuations, refractoriness and adaptation"

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-16:30 Giancarlo La Camera (Stony Brook University, NY, United States)
Talk title: “Prefrontal population activity during strategic behavior in context-dependent tasks”
16:30-17:00 Gorka Zamora-López (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
Talk title: "Emergence and maintenance of modular hierarchy in neural networks driven by external stimuli"
17:00-17:30 Sacha van Albada (Research Center Juelich and University of Cologne, Germany)
Talk title: "Determinants of population activity in full-density spiking models of cerebral cortex"