The following activities were written for the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2009) conference for use at our demo table for Nengo. The software for use in this tutorial can be downloaded at http://www.nengo.ca. This demo is available online at http://ctnsrv.uwaterloo.ca/cnrglab/node/175.

The videos we were running at the demo booth are posted here: http://www.yout ube.com/watch?v=q4jxI26gUtA.

Nengo (www.nengo.ca) is a graphical neural simulation environment. The following are available at the booth, and on the web.

Rapid tutorials (3-5 min)

• Rapid tutorial - Nonlinear transformations

• Rapid tutorial - An integrator

• Rapid tutorial - Braitenberg vehicle

Tutorials (10-15 min)

• Building motor cortex (vector representations)

• Building a feedforward network (part 1)

• Building a feedforward network (part 2)

• Building a feedforward network (part 3)

• Building a neural integrator

• Building a controlled integrator

Demos (3-5 min)

• Demo - Somatosensory working memory

• Demo - Learning feedforward transformations

• Demo - Simple motor control (arm)

Other

• Interactive plots reference sheet

• Advanced Nengo tips and tricks

Selected related publications

Stewart, T.C., Tripp, B., Eliasmith, C. (2009) Python Scripting in the Nengo Simulator. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. 3:7.

Stewart, T. and C. Eliasmith. (2009) Compositionality and biologically plausible models. In W. Hinzen, E. Machery, and M. Werning (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Compositionality. Oxford University Press.

Singh, R. and C. Eliasmith (2006). Higher-dimensional neurons explain the tuning and dynamics of working memory cells. Journal of Neuroscience. 26: 3667-3678.

Eliasmith, C. (2005). A unified approach to building and controlling spiking attractor networks. Neural Computation. 17(6): 1276-1314.

Eliasmith, C. and C. H. Anderson (2003). Neural Engineering: Computation, representation and dynamics in neurobiological systems. MIT Press.