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Nicholas Rondoni, a Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, won the Best Poster award at the Northern and Central California section meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
Rondoni’s research focuses on the accurate inference of neuronal spiking activity — the electrical activity within the brain that neurons use to communicate with each other.
Accurate measurement of neuronal spiking activity does not scale up easily to measure collections of neurons. A common approach to measuring neuronal activity is through two-photon calcium imaging. However, this results in a challenging inverse problem given noisy and convoluted measurements.
Rondoni presents a control theoretic approach leveraging a mechanistic model with model predictive control (MPC) to infer spiking events. This method can be used in applications requiring real-time feedback control and has comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods.
His Ph.D. advisor is Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics Marcella Gomez.
This meeting was the first for the North and Central California section of SIAM, which strives to provide a strong social and professional network for mathematicians working in academia, national laboratories, and industry.
“This is such a great opportunity for our students that do not have opportunities to attend more costly and distant conferences,” Gomez said.