Speakers
[1. Dr. V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy]
V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy obtained his BTech from IIT Madras, MS /Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He received postdoctoral training in the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. The Computational Neuroscience Lab (CNS Lab) that he heads works on developing models of the basal ganglia, spatial navigation, stroke rehabilitation, and neurovascular coupling. He is the author of two books in neuroscience. He is the inventor of a novel script called Bharati, a unified script for Indian languages.
[2. Dr. Narayanan Srinivasan ]
Dr. Narayanan Srinivasan is currently Professor and Head at the Department of Cognitive Science, IIT Kanpur. He worked at the Centre of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad for 17 years. He studies mental processes, especially attention, emotions, consciousness, and decision making using multiple methodologies. Dr. Srinivasan is a fellow of Association for Psychological Science, National Academy of Psychology (India), and Psychonomic Society.
[3. Dr. Balaraman Ravindran]
Dr. Balaraman Ravindran is the Mindtree Faculty Fellow and a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the head of Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He completed his Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He had also worked with Prof. Andrew G. Barto on an algebraic framework for abstraction in Reinforcement Learning. His research interests span the broader area of machine learning, ranging from Spatio-temporal Abstractions in Reinforcement Learning to social network analysis and Data/Text Mining. Much of the work in hsi group is directed toward understanding interactions and learning from them.
[4. Dr. Frederic Alexandre]
Dr. Frédéric Alexandre is the head of the Mnemosyne Team, Inria Project-Team of the Inria Research Centre Bordeaux Sud-Ouest, common with the CNRS UMR LaBRI laboratory in computer science, hosted by the UMR IMN (Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives), in the Bordeaux Neurocampus (University of Bordeaux).
The goal of his team, at the frontier between integrative and computational neuroscience, is to model the brain as a system of active memories in synergy and in interaction with the world and to simulate it as a whole and in situation. His team also gives special emphasis to decision making and associated pathologies, and interested in large scale implementation and in robotics.
[5. Dr. S.P Arun]
Dr. S.P Arun received his B.Tech from IIT Bombay, and MS & PhD from Johns Hopkins University, all in Electrical Engineering. After his postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University, he joined the Centre for Neuroscience at IISc. He is fascinated by how the brain transforms sensory inputs into perception.
[6. Dr. Jyoti Mishra]
Dr. Jyoti Mishra is the founder of the Neural Engineering & Translation Labs (NEAT Labs) at UC San Diego (https://neatlabs.ucsd.edu). She is trained in computational, cognitive and translational neurosciences and have expertise in studies of attention, learning and brain plasticity, and have contributed to technology innovations in video gaming, cognitive training, self regulation training, and brain computer interfaces. At the intersection of neuroscience and digital tech, NEAT Labs R&D is informing personalized mental healthcare, education as well as climate change adaptation. NEAT Labs innovates neuro-technologies for scalable brain health mapping, monitoring and precision therapeutics and research across the lifespan and across the spectrum of mental health in diverse local and global communities.
[7. Dr. Dhakshin Ramanathan]
Dr. Ramanathan is a clinician-scientist trained in neuroscience and psychiatry. He is interested in developing novel, circuit-targeted approaches to enhance neural plasticity and improve mental and neurological illnesses. He co-founded the Neural Engineering and Translation Labs at UC San Diego with these goals in mind, and leads the animal behavioral neuroscience team, where current projects are focused on mapping mesoscopic brain-networks in animals associated with complex decision-making and reward processing and comparing circuits between Animals and Humans.
[8. Dr. Shyam Diwakar]
Dr. Shyam Diwakar is the director of the Mind Brain Center at Amrita University. He was awarded the Young Faculty Research Fellowship by the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India and was awarded the 2015 NVIDIA Innovation award. While teaching at the Schools of Engineering, Biotechnology at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, he is the PI on Cognitive Science Research Initiative projects funded by the DST and the Indian PI on 2 EU based projects, WeNet - The Internet of Us and the BOLDsim of EU's Human Brain Project in addition to the 12 year Virtual Labs project funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India.
[9. Dr. Ramakrishna Pasumarthy ]
Human cognition is associated with a complex sequence of interactions between multiple networks in the brain. The static organization of brain networks is captured as a map of the neural connections called the connectome. While the connectome provides the basic wiring diagram of the brain, functional brain states emerge from the connectome and complex dynamical interactions between brain regions. However the relationship between structure and function is not trivial as a connectome can support multiple dynamical states. Recent research has imported tools from network science control theory towards studying controllability properties of brain circuits, and investigating the possibility of restoring or enhancing brain activity using brain stimulation. In this talk we show how controllability changes with varying cognitive load. In particular, we show that network controllability decreases with working memory load and that the salient node nodes exhibit the highest functional controllability.
[10. Dr. Shubhajit Roy Chowdhury]
Dr. Shubhajit Roy Chowdhury was born on August 27, 1981. He completed his Ph. D from the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, Jadavpur University in the year 2010. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Previously, he also served as an Assistant Professor at the Centre for VLSI and Embedded Systems Technology, IIIT Hyderabad. He is the recipient of university gold medals in 2004 and 2006 for his B.E. and M.E. respectively, Altera Embedded Processor Designer Award in 2007, winner of five best paper awards. He received the award of the Fellow of Society of Applied Biotechnology (FSAB) by the Society of Applied Biotechnology in the year 2012. He is also awarded Young Engineers’ Award 2012-13 by the Institution of Engineers, India for his outstanding contribution in the field of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. He also received the award of the Fellow of the Association for the advancement of Biodiversity Sciences in the year 2014. He is the recipient of VIFA Young Faculty Award in the year 2015 and also the recipient of Young Neurologist Award from the World Stroke Organization in the year 2015. He has published over hundred papers in international journals and conferences. He is a reviewer of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, IEEE Transactions on Measurement and Instrumentation, IEEE Sensors Journal, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, Journal of Medical Systems, Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing and other reputed journals. He is an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Public Health and also the member of editorial board of Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. He has authored 7 books and book-chapters. He has currently filed five patents and has been granted two copyrights in the field of non invasive medical diagnosis and one US patent on non-invasive brain stimulation. His research interests span around the development of Biomedical Embedded Systems, VLSI architectures, near infra-red spectroscopy based non invasive diagnosis and ASIC design of intelligent signal processing circuits. He is keenly interested in the educational system and its necessary transformation.
[11. Dr. Mayank Mehta]
Dr. Mayank R. Mehta, M.Sc., Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Neurology, Physics, and Astronomy at the Brain Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He earned his Bachelors in physics and mathematics and Masters in nuclear physics from Bombay University and later earned his Ph.D. in quantum field theory from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona, and then became a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[12. Dr. Anirban Dutta]
Dr. Anirban Dutta is an Associate Professor of Research of Biomedical Engineering and Surgery, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences at the University at Buffalo (UB)’s Jacobs School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Buffalo, USA. As the director of UB’s Neuroengineering and Informatics for Rehabilitation Laboratory (NIRlab), Dr. Dutta conduct interdisciplinary research in neural engineering, the application of engineering to neurosciences. Dr. Dutta’s academic and research training in neurotechnology, motor rehabilitation, clinical neurophysiology, and cerebrovascular medicine provided him with the expertise for translational research focused on developing neural interfaces to monitor and activate beneficial neural function.
[13. Dr. Pradnya Gadgil]
Dr. Pradnya Gadgil is a Paediatric neurologist and Epileptologist with special interests in complex epilepsy/ epilepsy surgery/ paediatric stroke and tuberous sclerosis. Dr Gadgil actively engages in projects which ‘action epilepsy’ outside the purview of a hospital. It ranges from collaborations for rural epilepsy camps to diagnose / treat kids with epilepsy free to organizing and/or teaching at scientific meetings both local and international.
[14. Mr. Kumaar Bagrodia]
Mr. Kumaar Bagrodia is the founder of NeuroLeap, India's leading applied neuroscience company. NeuroLeap leverages brain-computer interface technology to understand the brain and help it work at optimum potential. Often known as India's "Brain Enhancer", Kumaar is a member of the national startup council of CII and also a member of Apex Council of the India Innovation Initiative by the Government of India. He has delivered keynotes and invited for talks in leading national and international podiums including the G20 Summits, UN Environmental program, World Neuron Congress, World brain congress to name a few. He was invited by Hon’ble President of India to his official residence in 2017 and was invited again in March 2018 to speak on Innovation. He was also a speaker at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London in 2018 and was also an invitee to the palace by His Royal Highness Prince of Wales. He is an alumnus of the University of Oxford, and is a Country Champion and Ambassador for the Oxford Business Alumni in India.