[USS 2022] Opening remarks and Keynote talk #1: Guillaume Hennequin, PhD

The 2022 UNIQUE Student Symposium June 9th and 10th, 2022 Keynote talk #1: "V1 be one: unifying phenomenology and function in a network model of cortical variability" Guillaume Hennequin is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). About this talk: Cortical responses to visual stimuli have a rich phenomenology, with well-documented nonlinearities, transients, oscillations, and stimulus-dependent patterns of across-trial variability. What principles of network dynamics underlie these features, and what function(s) do they serve? I will present our recent efforts to address these questions and unify previously disparate bottom-up and top-down models of V1. First, I will show that several key properties of V1 responses are difficult to reconcile with the classical theory of tightly balanced E/I networks; on the contrary, a regime of loose E/I balance accomodates these properties robustly (Hennequin et al., Neuron (2018)). Second, building up on this, I will show that yet more properties of V1 dynamics emerge in a loosely-balanced network model trained to perform sampling-based Bayesian inference (Echeveste et al., Nat. Neurosci. (2020)). About USS 2022: USS (UNIQUE Student Symposium) is a student-oriented, student-organized conference at the crossroads of neuroscience and AI research. The goal is to provide graduate students in those fields with an event tailor made to their needs and presenting the state of the art of what is done in neuro-AI research. This third edition of USS is presented in a hybrid mode with participants from all around the globe attending online and in-person participants attending the event at Mila, Montréal (Canada).