Talk: Applied Informatics for Brain network decoding and disease identification
Cognition is one of the main capabilities of the mammal brain and understanding it thoroughly requires decoding the Brain’s information processing pathways (IPPs) which are composed of neuronal networks formed by complex connectivity among neurons. This talk will showcase applied informatics to decode neuronal networks at the first level of approximation. The example will illustrate the decoding of networks during whisking – an action that represents sensing in rodents. This high-level cognitive function allows rodents to localise objects and discriminate textures. Conventionally, scientists mostly rely on local field potentials (LFPs) averaged over several trials to infer the IPP. However, considering the probabilistic nature of the Brain, this may lead to information loss when trying to understand its stochasticity demonstrated during information processing. As LFPs represent lumped activities of populations of neurons, their shapes serve as fingerprints of the underlying networks which can be used in identifying diseases and building smart neuroprosthetic devices.
Dr Mufti Mahmud received his PhD degree in information engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2011. He is currently serving as an Associate Professor of Cognitive Computing at Department of Computer Science of Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is recipient of the NTU Vice-Chancellor’s outstanding research award in 2020 and the Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2013. Dr Mahmud’s expertise include computational intelligence, applied data analysis, and big data technologies with a keen focus on neuroscience and healthcare applications. As of July 2021, he has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles and papers in leading journals and conferences, and (co-)edited 5 volumes and many journal special issues. Dr Mahmud has secured research grants totalling around £3.3 million and has supervised over 50 research students (PhD, Masters and Bachelor).
He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, a Professional Member of the British Computer Society, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the UK. Dr Mahmud has been serving as the Vice-Chair of the Intelligent System Application and Brain Informatics Technical Committees of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), a member of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Intelligence Systems for Health, an advisor of the IEEE R8 Humanitarian Activities Subcommittee, the Publications Chair of the IEEE UK and Ireland Industry Applications Chapter, and the Project Liaison Officer of the IEEE UK and Ireland SIGHT Committee. He has also served as the coordinating chair of the local organization of the IEEE-WCCI2020; the General Chair of Brian Informatics 2020 and 2021 editions and 2021 Applied Intelligence and Informatics conference. He also serves as the Program Chair of IEEE-CICARE conference series since 2018. Moreover, he serves as a Section Editor (Big Data Analytics) for the Cognitive Computation journal, an associate editor of the Frontiers in Neuroscience, and a Regional Editor (Europe) for the Brain Informatics journal. He is also the editor of “Smart Healthcare Systems: From Data to Knowledge” book series published by the CRC press.
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