TITLE: 
Algorithms and data structures in the (fruit fly) brain

SPEAKER: 
Saket Navlakha, Cold Spring Harbor Lab, Long Island, NY

TIME & LOCATION: 
11am, Friday (Feb 7), NCS 120

ABSTRACT: 
A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is to understand the algorithms that neural circuits have evolved to solve computational problems critical for survival. In this talk, I will describe how the olfactory circuit in the fruit fly brain has evolved simple yet effective algorithms to process and store odors. First, I will describe how fruit flies use a variant of a traditional computer science algorithm (called locality-sensitive hashing) to perform efficient similarity searches. Second, I will describe how this circuit uses a variant of a classic data structure (called a Bloom filter) to perform novelty detection for odors. In both cases, we show that tricks from biology can be translated to improve machine computation, while also raising new hypotheses about neural function.

SPEAKER BIO: 
Saket Navlakha of Cold Spring Harbor Lab works at the interface of computer science and natural systems. His lab studies “algorithms in nature”, particularly with respect to neural circuit computation and plant architecture optimization. This is interesting stuff, reported in Science (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6364/793),