My interest lies in how a population of cortical neurons encode and subsequently perform computations on the world state variables. In particular, I have studied how sensory cortical population represent visual stimulus information including the sensory uncertainty in accordance to the theory of probabilistic population coding (PPC), combining population electrophysiology from Macaque V1 with Bayesian and neural network analysis to decode the likelihood functions. I have also been working on building network models of sensory cortex to understand the representation and computation carried out by repeating canonical computation units in mouse brain.

Lab members are shown in this color.

2023

Konstantin-Klemens Lurz1, Mohammad Bashiri1, Edgar Y. Walker, Fabian H. Sinz Bayesian Oracle for bounding information gain in neural encoding models ICLR 2023 (accepted) , equal contribution: 1

2022

Arne Nix, Suhas Shrinivasan, Edgar Y. Walker, Fabian H. Sinz Can Functional Transfer Methods Capture Simple Inductive Biases? AISTATS 2022

2021

Mohammad Bashiri, Edgar Y. Walker, Konstantin-Klemens Lurz, Akshay Kumar Jagadish, Taliah Muhammad, Zhiwei Ding, Zhuokun Ding, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz A flow-based latent state generative model of neural population responses to natural images NeurIPS (spotlight)
MICrONS Consortium, J. Alexander Bae, Mahaly Baptiste, Agnes L. Bodor, Derrick Brittain, JoAnn Buchanan, Daniel J. Bumbarger, Manuel A. Castro, Brendan Celii, Erick Cobos, Forrest Collman, Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Sven Dorkenwald, Leila Elabbady, Paul G. Fahey, Tim Fliss, Emmanouil Froudakis, Jay Gager, Clare Gamlin, Akhilesh Halageri, James Hebditch, Zhen Jia, Chris Jordan, Daniel Kapner, Nico Kemnitz, Sam Kinn, Selden Koolman, Kai Kuehner, Kisuk Lee, Kai Li, Ran Lu, Thomas Macrina, Gayathri Mahalingam, Sarah McReynolds, Elanine Miranda, Eric Mitchell, Shanka Subhra Mondal, Merlin Moore, Shang Mu, Taliah Muhammad, Barak Nehoran, Oluwaseun Ogedengbe, Christos Papadopoulos, Stelios Papadopoulos, Saumil Patel, Xaq Pitkow, Sergiy Popovych, Anthony Ramos, R. Clay Reid, Jacob Reimer, Casey M. Schneider-Mizell, H. Sebastian Seung, Ben Silverman, William Silversmith, Amy Sterling, Fabian H. Sinz, Cameron L. Smith, Shelby Suckow, Zheng H. Tan, Andreas S. Tolias, Russel Torres, Nicholas L. Turner, Edgar Y. Walker, Tianyu Wang, Grace Williams, Sarah Williams, Kyle Willie, Ryan Willie, William Wong, Jingpeng Wu, Chris Xu, Runzhe Yang, Dimitri Yatsenko, Fei Ye, Wenjing Yin, Szi-chieh Y Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex biorXiv
preprint · neuroscience · biorXiv
Max F. Burg, Santiago A. Cadena, George H. Denfield, Edgar Y. Walker, Leon A. Gatys, Andreas S. Tolias, Matthias Bethge, Alexander S. Ecker Learning Divisive Normalization in Primary Visual Cortex PLoS Computational Biology
Dimitri Yatsenko, Thinh Nguyen, Shan Shen, Kabilar Gunalan, Christopher A. Turner, Raphael Guzman, Maho Sasaki, Daniel Sitonic, Jacob Reimer, Edgar Y. Walker, Andreas Tolias DataJoint Elements: Data Workflows for Neurophysiology bioRxiv
preprint · datajoint · pdf
Konstantin-Klemens Lurz, Mohammad Bashiri, Konstantin Friedrich Willeke, Akshay Kumar Jagadish, Eric Wang, Edgar Y Walker, Santiago Cadena, Taliah Muhammad, Eric Cobos, Andreas Tolias, Alexander Ecker, Fabian Sinz Generalization in data-driven models of primary visual cortex ICLR (spotlight)

2019

Edgar Y. Walker, R. James Cotton, Wei Ji Ma, Andreas S. Tolias A neural basis of probabilistic computation in visual cortex Nature Neuroscience (accepted)
journal paper · normative models · bioRxiv
Zhe Li, Wieland Brendel, Edgar Walker, Erick Cobos, Taliah Muhammad, Jacob Reimer, Matthias Bethge, Fabian Sinz, Xaq Pitkow, Andreas Tolias Learning from brains how to regularize machines NeurIPS (accepted)
Edgar Y. Walker1, Fabian H. Sinz1, Erick Cobos, Taliah Muhammad, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Paul G. Fahey, Alexander S. Ecker, Jacob Reimer, Xaq Pitkow, Andreas S. Tolias Inception loops discover what excites neurons most using deep predictive models Nature Neuroscience , equal contribution: 1
Santiago A. Cadena, Fabian H. Sinz, Taliah Muhammad, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Erick Cobos, Edgar Y. Walker, Jake Reimer, Matthias Bethge, Andreas Tolias, Alexander S. Ecker How well do deep neural networks trained on object recognition characterize the mouse visual system? NeurIPS workshop on Real Neurons & Hidden Units (accepted for talk)
Christoph Blessing, Edgar Y. Walker, Katrina R. Quinn, R. James Cotton, Wei Ji Ma, Andreas S. Tolias, Hendrikje Nienborg, Fabian H. Sinz Neural Likelihood Cognitive Computational Neuroscience
Paul G. Fahey, Taliah Muhammad, Cameron Smith, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Erick Cobos, Jiakun Fu, Edgar Y. Walker, Dimitri Yatsenko, Fabian H. Sinz, Jacob Reimer, Andreas S. Tolias A global map of orientation tuning in mouse visual cortex biorxiv
Alexander S. Ecker, Fabian H. Sinz, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Paul G. Fahey, Santiago A. Cadena, Edgar Y. Walker, Erick Cobos, Jacob Reimer, Andreas S. Tolias, Matthias Bethge A rotation-equivariant convolutional neural network model of primary visual cortex ICLR 2019
S. A. Cadena, G. H. Denfield, E. Y. Walker, L. A. Gatys, A. S. Tolias, M. Bethge, and A. S. Ecker Deep convolutional models improve predictions of macaque V1 responses to natural images PLoS Computational Biology
journal paper · system identification · PLoS

2018

Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander S. Ecker, Paul G. Fahey, Edgar Y. Walker, Erick Cobos, Emmanouil Froudarakis, Dimitri Yatsenko, Xaq Pitkow, Jacob Reimer, Andreas S. Tolias Stimulus domain transfer in recurrent models for large scale cortical population prediction on video NeurIPS

Oct 2018 - Neuronal Intelligence Lab Start

2016

X. Jiang, S. Shen, F. Sinz, J. Reimer, C.R. Cadwell, P. Berens, A.S. Ecker, S. Patel, G.H. Denfield, E. Froudarakis, S. Li, E. Walker, A.S. Tolias Response to Comment on "principles of connectivity among morphologically defined cell types in adult neocortex" Science, 353

2015

D. Yatsenko, J. Reimer, A. S. Ecker, E. Y. Walker, F. Sinz, P. Berens, A. Hoenselaar, R. J. Cotton, A. S. Siapas, A. S. Tolias DataJoint: managing big scientific data using MATLAB or Python biorxiv