Dr. Kang Shen is a neuroscientist, an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is the Vincent V.C. Woo Director of Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. Dr. Shen and his team have studied neural circuits for years based on researching cell biological events during development of neural circuits. In this exciting talk, he will cover the latest developments in neuroscience in understanding the brain and the nervous system. This includes the highlight of research progress at the Stanford’s neurosciences institute. He will discuss how brains process information in the context of spatial learning in memory, progress from brain-machine interfaces, and brain aging and resilience. These research areas are aimed to understand both how brain functions as a input-output device to encode information and generate response, and how brain cells are constructed by biological materials.

Abstract:

Technological advances in the recent decades have revolutionized biology. Our understanding of how the brain develops, functions and ages remain rudimentary. Constructed by tens of thousands of genes in hundreds of millions of cells, the human brain is the most complex organ. This complexity presents challenges to understand how the brain produces behavior, encodes and stores information. I will discuss the progress and challenges of system, cellular and molecular neuroscience. The topic of discussion will include ongoing research in the Stanford WuTsai Neuroscience Institute in spatial learning and memory, brain machine interface and brain aging.

Dr. Bill Dally is Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at NVIDIA Corporation and an Adjunct Professor and former chair of Computer Science at Stanford University. Bill is currently working on developing hardware and software to accelerate demanding applications including machine learning, bioinformatics, and logical inference.  He has a history of designing innovative and efficient experimental computing systems.  He developed much of the technology used in high-performance computer networks – from the routing and flow control protocols down to the signaling and equalization methods used on the wire. His development of stream processing at Stanford led to GPU computing. GPUs now power the world’s fastest supercomputers and enable the current revolution in AI. He co-founded STAC, AVICI Systems, Velio Communications, and Stream Processors. While at Bell Labs Bill contributed to the BELLMAC32 microprocessor and designed the MARS hardware accelerator. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing Chip which pioneered network routing and flow control technology. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology his group built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that were the first to demonstrate many communication and synchronization methods.  At Stanford University his group developed the Imagine processor, which introduced the concepts of stream processing and partitioned register organizations, the Merrimac streaming supercomputer, which led to GPU computing, the ELM low-power processor, the Darwin bioinformatics accelerator, and the Satin SAT solving accelerator.  Bill is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He has received the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the IEEE Seymour Cray Award, the ACM Maurice Wilkes award, the IEEE-CS Charles Babbage Award, and the IPSJ FUNAI Achievement Award.  He is a member of President Biden’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST). He currently leads projects on computer architecture, network architecture, circuit design, and programming systems. He has published over 250 papers in these areas, holds over 160 issued patents, and is an author of the textbooks: Digital Design: A Systems Approach, Digital Systems Engineering, and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks.