Welcome to Fukai Lab!
Overview
High-level functions of the brain, such as perception, learning and memory, decision making, etc., emerge from computations by neuronal networks. My lab uses theoretical and electrophysiological approaches to better understand the fundamental properties of neural networks.
Uncovering the circuit mechanism is particularly important as I consider that most of the advantages of brain's computation reside in the way the brain implements it by neural circuits. The brain is believed to utilize noise for modeling the external world for performing robust and flexible computations in sensory perception, decision making, and so on. The low energy consumption of the brain (~ a few tens of watts) also suggests that the powerful computations performed by the brain do not require a code with a clear separation between signals and noise.
The goal of our research is to uncover the principles of the brain's stochastic computation and to provide the theoretical basis for creating brain-style computing machines.
Current research interests
- Stochastic computation by the brain and its circuit mechanism
- Neural dynamics and information representations
- Theoretical/experimental studies of cortical microcircuit functions
- Information analysis of neural ensemble data
Recent major publications
Computational models
- Hiratani N, Teramae J-N and Fukai T (2013) Associative memory model with long-tail-distributed Hebbian synaptic connections. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 6:102. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00102
- Jun-nosuke Teramae, Yasuhiro Tsubo, Tomoki Fukai (2012) Optimal spike-based communication in excitable networks with strong-sparse and weak-dense links, Scientific Reports 2, 485. doi:10.1038/srep00485.
- Y Tsubo, Y Isomura, T Fukai (2012) Power-law inter-spike interval distributions infer a conditional maximization of entropy in cortical neurons, PLoS Computational Biology, e1002461.
- Matthieu Gilson and Tomoki Fukai (2011) Stability versus Neuronal Specialization for STDP: Long-Tail Weight Distributions Solve the Dilemma. PLoS ONE 6(10), e25339.
- Isomura Y, Harukuni R, Takekawa T, Aizawa H, Fukai T (2009) Microcircuitry coordination of cortical motor information in self-initiation of voluntary movements. Nature Neuroscience 12,1586-1593.
- Takashi Takekawa, Yoshikazu Isomura, Tomoki Fukai (2012) Spike sorting of heterogeneous neuron types by multimodality-weighted PCA and explicit robust variational Bayes, Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 6:5, doi: 10.3389/fninf.2012.00005.