OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
An important open question in neuroscience is how sensory information is represented and transformed by circuits in the cortex. To study this we created the Allen Brain Observatory. This open dataset is a large-scale, systematic survey of physiological activity in the awake mouse cortex recorded using 2-photon calcium imaging. It consists of over 63,000 neurons recorded in over 1300 imaging sessions, surveying 6 cortical areas, 4 cortical layers, and 14 transgenically defined cell types (Cre lines). In this talk I will describe our analysis of this dataset revealing functional organization of visual responses across cortical areas and layers. Using the joint reliabilities of responses to multiple stimuli, we classify neurons into functional classes and validate this classification with models of visual responses. Further, I will show recent work looking at how inhibitory interneurons in the cortical circuit regulate network dynamics, balancing sensitivity and network stability.
