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Panel: 
Ralph Greenspan, Associate Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego (KIBM)
Terrence Sejnowski, Director, Institute for Neural Computation, Salk Institute for Biological Studies and UC San Diego
Todd Hylton, Senior Vice President, Brain Corporation
Anthony Lewis, Senior Director, Qualcomm

Moderator:
Roger Bingham, Director, Co-founder, The Science Network

This was the public debut of the BRAIN video, commissioned by The Kavli Foundation. During the discussion period, remarks about The Kavli Foundation’s role in the BAM and BRAIN projects were delivered by Miyoung Chun. 

Biographies

Ralph Greenspan, Ph.D.
Ralph J. Greenspan, Ph.D. is the Associate Director, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UCSD. Dr. Greenspan has worked on the genetic foundations of behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila almost since the inception of the field, studying with one of its founders, Jeffrey Hall, at Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in biology in 1979. He subsequently conducted research at Princeton University, the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, and New York University, The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, until moving in 2010 to his current position at UCSD. Dr. Greenspan's research activities have included the demonstration that the fly has sleep-like and attention-like behaviors similar to those of humans, the molecular identification of genes underlying natural variations in behavior, and studies of the principles governing the gene and neuronal networks underlying behavior. In addition to numerous research papers, he has also authored an article for Scientific American and several books, including Genetic Neurobiology with Jeffrey Hall and William Harris, Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics, and The World As We Find It: An Introduction to Nervous Systems. He was a founding member in Sept. 2011 of the scientific working group that framed the proposal on brain mapping for the White House Office of Science and Technology, which eventually gave rise to the B.R.A.I.N. Initiative recently announced by President Obama.

Terrence Sejnowski, Ph.D.
Terrence Sejnowski is a pioneer in computational neuroscience and his goal is to understand the principles that link brain to behavior. His laboratory uses both experimental and modeling techniques to study the biophysical properties of synapses and neurons and the population dynamics of large networks of neurons. New computational models and new analytical tools have been developed to understand how the brain represents the world and how new representations are formed through learning algorithms for changing the synaptic strengths of connections between neurons. He has published over 400 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain, with Patricia Churchland.

He received his PhD in physics from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He was on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University and now holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and is also a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he is co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation and co-director of the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, which organizes an annual conference attended by over 1300 researchers in machine learning and neural computation and is the founding editor-in-chief of Neural Computation published by the MIT Press.

An investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. He has received many honors, including the NSF Young Investigators Award, the Wright Prize for interdisciplinary research from the Harvey Mudd College, the Neural Network Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Hebb Prize from the International Neural Network Society and the Rosenblatt Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, one of only 10 living persons to be a member of all 3 national academies.

Todd Hylton, Ph.D.
Dr. Hylton is a Senior Vice President in charge of business and technical strategy at Brain Corporation, a startup company based in San Diego, CA working to develop electronic systems inspired by biological neural systems for applications in robotics and vision. Prior to joining Brain Corporation he worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a program manager, where he developed and managed programs in neuromorphic electronics, the foundations of intelligence, and small unmanned systems. Previously, he led a group of scientists and engineers working in advanced materials and nanotechnology at SAIC, providing technology development and integration services to government clients. He was the co-founder and president of 4Wave, Inc., a small technology business providing specialized thin film fabrication equipment. Dr. Hylton spent 5 years working in small and medium sized semiconductor equipment firms as a senior technical officer and innovator of equipment that is used to fabricate magnetic recording heads. He worked in the magnetic storage industry for 7 years, including 4 years at IBM in the early development of giant magnetoresistive technology. He holds a B.S. in physics from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University. His thesis examined electrical transport and defects in high temperature superconductors. Dr. Hylton is the author of 19 patents and more than 30 scientific publications.

Anthony Lewis, Ph.D.
Dr. M Anthony Lewis a Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technology Research and Development working toward the development of a new class of computing devices for the consumer and research community markets. Dr. Lewis received a B.S. in Cybernetics from the UCLA and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from USC. Dr. Lewis has held faculty positions in the life sciences and engineering at UCLA, UIUC, and the University of Arizona and was a founder of Iguana Robotics, Inc. Dr. Lewis is a leading expert in the application of neuromorphic technology to the control of biologically inspired robots and participated in a project to restore walking in a paralyzed animal model via micro-stimulation of the spinal cord by a neuromorphic chip. Dr. Lewis is also a pioneer in evolutionary robotics and cooperative robotics and the author of more than 80 technical articles and the recipient of multiple best paper awards.