Event Registration

(ET) Please join Andrea Vaccari, assistant professor of computer science, for a talk entitled "How do fruit flies see, and what does computer science have to do with it?" All animals have visual systems that allow them to process relevant visual stimuli to inform their behaviors. In mammalians, these systems are very complex and often show the presence of retinotopy, a mechanism by which specific regions of the retina (the light-sensitive part of the eye) are mapped onto corresponding locations in the brain, helping preserve spatial information about the visual stimulus. But what about fruit flies? How do they process visual stimuli? In this talk, I will take you on an excursion into the fruit fly’s visual system and show you how, using data from the fruit fly’s connectome (a dataset providing a comprehensive map of the wiring in their brain) and machine learning techniques (clustering and classification), we can start to make sense of how the fruit fly’s brain interprets spatial information.