Helmut Strey
I am an Associate Professor at the Biomedical Engineering Department at Stony Brook University. I also have affiliate positions at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH/Harvard Medical School and at JuliaLab at MIT/CSAIL. I am currently leading the development of Neuroblox.jl, a Julia package to design, simulate, and analyze dynamic models of the brain. Our effort is built on top of ModelingToolkit.jl, but we are also developing our own, and sometimes more efficient, algorithms to build graphs of dynamical motives (we just released GraphDynamics.jl
Session
Chaotic neural dynamics resist equation discovery because parameter sensitivity creates intractable optimization landscapes. Using the SciML ecosystem, we combine prediction-error methods with universal differential equations (PEM-UDE) and multiple shooting to tame chaos during learning. In spiking networks, we derive novel mean-field equations for sparse cortical connectivity that predict frequency shifts and synchrony patterns, validated by intracranial recordings.