This lesson describes spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), a biological process that adjusts the strength of connections between neurons in the brain, and how one can implement or mimic this process in a computational model. You will also find links for practical exercises at the bottom of this page. 

This lesson provides a brief introduction to the Computational Modeling of Neuronal Plasticity.

In this lesson, you will be introducted to a type of neuronal model known as the leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) model.

This lesson goes over various potential inputs to neuronal synapses, loci of neural communication.

This lesson describes the how and why behind implementing integration time steps as part of a neuronal model.

In this lesson, you will learn about neural spike trains which can be characterized as having a Poisson distribution.

This lesson covers spike-rate adaptation, the process by which a neuron's firing pattern decays to a low, steady-state frequency during the sustained encoding of a stimulus.

This lesson provides a brief explanation of how to implement a neuron's refractory period in a computational model.

In this lesson, you will learn a computational description of the process which tunes neuronal connectivity strength, spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP).

This lesson reviews theoretical and mathematical descriptions of correlated spike trains.

This lesson investigates the effect of correlated spike trains on spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP).

This lesson goes over synaptic normalisation, the homeostatic process by which groups of weighted inputs scale up or down their biases.

In this lesson, you will learn about the intrinsic plasticity of single neurons.

This lesson covers short-term facilitation, a process whereby a neuron's synaptic transmission is enhanced for a short (sub-second) period.

This lesson describes short-term depression, a reduction of synaptic information transfer between neurons.

This lesson briefly wraps up the course on Computational Modeling of Neuronal Plasticity.

The goal of computational modeling in behavioral and psychological science is using mathematical models to characterize behavioral (or neural) data. Over the past decade, this practice has revolutionized social psychological science (and neuroscience) by allowing researchers to formalize theories as constrained mathematical models and test specific hypotheses to explain unobservable aspects of complex social cognitive processes and behaviors. This course is composed of 4 modules in the format of Jupyter Notebooks. This course comprises lecture-based, discussion-based, and lab-based instruction. At least one-third of class sessions will be hands-on. We will discuss relevant book chapters and journal articles, and work with simulated and real data using the Python programming language (no prior programming experience necessary) as we survey some selected areas of research at the intersection of computational modeling and social behavior. These selected topics will span a broad set of social psychological abilities including (1) learning from and for others, (2) learning about others, and (3) social influence on decision-making and mental states. Rhoads, S. A. & Gan, L. (2022). Computational models of human social behavior and neuroscience - An open educational course and Jupyter Book to advance computational training.  ​​​Journal of Open Source Education, 5(47), 146. https://doi.org/10.21105/jose.00146

In this session the Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) federated analytics is presented. The current and future analytical tools implemented in the MIP will be detailed along with the constructs, tools, processes, and restrictions that formulate the solution provided. MIP is a platform providing advanced federated analytics for diagnosis and research in clinical neuroscience research. It is targeting clinicians, clinical scientists and clinical data scientists. It is designed to help adopt advanced analytics, explore harmonized medical data of neuroimaging, neurophysiological and medical records as well as research cohort datasets, without transferring original clinical data. It can be perceived as a virtual database that seamlessly presents aggregated data from distributed sources, provides access and analyze imaging and clinical data, securely stored in hospitals, research archives and public databases. It leverages and re-uses decentralized patient data and research cohort datasets, without transferring original data. Integrated statistical analysis tools and machine learning algorithms are exposed over harmonized, federated medical data.

The Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) is a platform providing federated analytics for diagnosis and research in clinical neuroscience research. The federated analytics is possible thanks to a distributed engine that executes computations and transfers information between the members of the federation (hospital nodes). In this talk the speaker will describe the process of designing and implementing new analytical tools, i.e. statistical and machine learning algorithms.  Mr. Sakellariou will further describe the environment in which these federated algorithms run, the challenges and the available tools, the principles that guide its design and the followed general methodology for each new algorithm. One of the most important challenges which are faced is to design these tools in a way that does not compromise the privacy of the clinical data involved. The speaker will show how to address the main questions when designing such algorithms: how to decompose and distribute the computations and what kind of information to exchange between nodes, in order to comply with the privacy constraint mentioned above. Finally, also the subject of validating these federated algorithms will be briefly touched.

The Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) Dementia had been installed in several memory clinics across Europe allowing them to federate their real-world databases. Research open access databases had also been integrated such as ADNI (Alzheimer’s Dementia Neuroimaging Initiative), reaching a cumulative case load of more than 5,000 patients (major cognitive disorder due to Alzheimer’s disease, other major cognitive disorder, minor cognitive disorder, controls). The statistic and machine learning tools implemented in the MIP allowed researchers to conduct easily federated analyses among Italian memory clinics (Redolfi et al. 2020) and also across borders between the French (Lille), the Swiss (Lausanne) and the Italian (Brescia) datasets.