uOttawa

CENTRE FOR NEURAL DYNAMICS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

WHO WE ARE

Welcome to the University of Ottawa Centre for Neural Dynamics and Artificial Intelligence. This Center brings together research groups distributed across the faculties of Medicine, Science, Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Engineering, as well as The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. Our interests span molecular, cellular and systems neuroscience, physical theory and mathematical modeling, therapeutic brain stimulation and imaging, cognitive neuroscience, and the interface of these fields between each other and with machine learning and AI.

Created in 2005, the CNDAI fosters the scientific interaction of scientists and clinicians in brain-related areas with researchers in the physical and computational sciences. Members of the Centre share a common approach for achieving a mechanistic understanding of how brain activity is generated and evolves in time, i.e. a "dynamical approach", and why it is altered in disease.

The Centre’s investigators work on the Medical campus of the University of Ottawa (Roger Guindon Hall), its associated hospitals, as well as the STEM Building and other laboratories on the downtown main campus.  The Center promotes and supports the interdisciplinary research ventures between its members as well as between members and researchers at other institutions worldwide. It provides the administrative framework for these ventures and for training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in an environment unique in Canada.

OUR DYNAMICAL APPROACH

Systems neuroscience strives to measure the activity of individual neurons or populations of neurons, and to link this neural activity with sensory, motor and cognitive functions. In the past decade there have been dramatic improvements in the technology to record neural activity, as well as in our understanding of the underlying cellular physiology of neurons and synapses. It has also become possible to quantitatively relate neural activity to complex sensory input or coordinated motor activity, although many fundamental questions remain. Computational and theoretical neuroscience are emerging disciplines that use the flood of data from systems and cellular neuroscience to develop mathematical or computational models of the dynamics of neurons, synapses and neural networks, and to relate these dynamics to how information is encoded and decoded in the brain. Computational and theoretical neuroscience are important complements to systems/cellular neuroscience and, as such, have also undergone explosive growth in the past decades. In more recent years, these tools have been augmented by machine learning and AI techniques, which can find patterns in large data sets and fit predictive models to neural data for classification, sequence memory and other applications.

Whereas systems neuroscientists are drawn from biological sciences, computational and theoretical neuroscientists generally have a background in physics, computer science, mathematics or engineering. This strongly interdisciplinary area of research exploits the natural synergy of these two groups. Experimentalists often pose the important initial questions, theoreticians develop models and make predictions, and together they test the proposed models and theories to achieve a deeper understanding of neural function and dysfunction, and figure out new therapeutic approaches.

Research in neuroscience, and especially clinical neuroscience that involves brain-computer interfaces, also raises significant ethical and philosophical questions. That is why the CNDAI also fosters interactions between the aforementioned scientists with practitioners in those areas.

OUR  MISSION

The mission of the CNDAI is the fostering of world-class interdisciplinary research into the fundamental dynamical workings of brain circuits at all scales, the associated training students and fellows in this exciting emerging area, and the translation of findings into the practical realm. By virtue of its strategic location between the faculties of Medicine, Science, Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Engineering, as well as the Ottawa Health Research Institutes at the General Hospital and affiliated teaching hospitals (CHEO, Bruyere, Royal and Montfort, and the Rehabilitation and Cancer centers), the CNDAI has also given itself the mission to be clinically relevant in much of its research. For example, our researchers study the diagnosis of normal vs pathological sensorimotor integration and rhythms, neuromuscular degeneration, memory loss, sleep dysregulation, and postural control in an aging population. Others devise new strategies for critical care management based on modeling autonomic regulation/coordination of multiple organs, or foster the development of  biomedical devices to assist sensory and motor function and recover from negative conditions such as strokes or epilepsy. The CNDAI thus also acts as the hub for industrial research and development partnerships.

OTHER LOCAL SCIENTIFIC LINKS

The CNDAI interacts with a number of Institutes in Ottawa. It is mainly affiliated to the uOttawa Brain and Mind Research Institute, where it serves as a cross-cutting research pillar. It is located next door to the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology, the Sprott Stem Cell Centre, the Rehabilitation Center, and other groups at the teaching hospitals such as the MS and Parkinson’s groups. Some members interact with the University of Ottawa Heart Institute through the Brain-Heart Interconnectome. On the main (downtown) campus, the satellite location is adjacent to many Biological Physics research groups (Profs. Slater, Joos, Harden, Czischek, Longtin, Godin, Ogilvie, Tabard-Cossa, Lefebvre and Naud). It is also next to the Center for Research in Photonics with which it shares common interests such as novel neuroimaging technique development, computational physics approaches to large numbers of interacting elements, to information processing in optical networks. International links can be found on the group members individual homepages.