Ron Yu, PhD
Professor and chair, Department of Neurosciences, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Date: Friday, April 20
Time: 9–9:50 a.m.
Location: SCOB 228
Faculty host: Shaopeng Wang
Abstract
Most terrestrial animals possess a strong sense of smell that allow them to navigate through the environment, locate food, find mates and avoid predators. The power of odor discrimination resides in the large number of olfactory receptors, but the receptors are not specific, presenting a puzzle of how the nervous system is able to rely on ephemeral and imprecise detections to identify odors in the environment. Our studies probe this question by analyzing the neuronal responses, manipulating the neural circuits and modeling the architecture of olfactory processing.
I will present a neural network model that we derived from the anatomical connectivity of the olfactory systems, and the algorithm that enables robust object recognition. This feedforward model illustrates how the biological brains may effortlessly solve many problems that are encountered by artificial neural networks, such as adversarial attack, catastrophic forgetting and the requirement to learn from extraordinarily large datasets to improve robustness.
Biosketch
Ron Yu is the Tilles-Weidenthal Professor and chair of the Department of Neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He graduated from Tsinghua University with Bachelor’s of Science degrees in biological sciences and in solid state physics. He earned his doctorate in molecular, cellular and biophysical Studies from Columbia University, working in the lab of Lorna Role on ion channels. He continued his postdoctoral training at Columbia working with Richard Axel.
He most recently served as an investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, and a professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center Department of Cell Biology and Physiology in Kansas City, Kansas. His research focuses on the complex neural circuitry of behavior, with specific focus on the mammalian olfactory system. Yu’s research explores on a systems level how different molecules and genes contribute to the development of the neural circuitry, and how the neuronal networks allow animals to perceive and understand the world.
