Yasser Roudi

Outreach and consultancy work:

Statistical mechanics of inference, neural networks, learning and memory

Yasser Roudi has been working on statistical inference and learning using methods of statistical mechanics, focusing on reverse engineering of networks. Recently, he has been working on learning in systems with hidden nodes and sparse reconstruction. Another topic is mechanisms of spatial navigation in mammals.

NEUROSCIENCE HONOURS

The Hertie Foundation in collaboration with the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) has awarded the 2015 Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize to the physicist and neuroscientist Yasser Roudi from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for Neural Computation, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.

Prof. Roudi has been awarded the prize “for his contributions to the applications of statistical physics to network reconstruction and the understanding of information processing in neuronal networks.”

The main theme of Prof. Roudi’s research is understanding the computational mechanisms and algorithms involved in learning and inference, and the possible implementation of such mechanisms in the nervous system. Recently, in collaboration with Profs Edvard and May-Britt Moser, who won the Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine this year, he has made important contributions to our understanding of the network mechanism underlying the mammalian spatial navigation and memory system.

Personal webpage

Key publications:

Edvard I. Moser, Yasser Roudi, Menno P. Witter, Clifford Kentros, Tobias Bonhoeffer & May-Britt Moser (2014) Grid cells and cortical representation, Nature Reviews Neuroscience Volume 15, 466–481

Tyrcha J., Roudi Y., Marsili M., Hertz J. (2012) Effect of Nonstationarity on Models Inferred from Neural Data, submitted     http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.1752

Sakellariou J., Roudi Y., Mezard M., Hertz J. (2012) Effect of coupling asymmetry on mean-field solutions of the direct and inverse Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, Phil. Mag., 92: 272

Roudi Y., Hertz J. (2011) Dynamical TAP equations for non-equilibrium Ising spin glasses, J. Stat. Mech., P03031

Roudi Y., Hertz J. (2011) Mean Field Theory For Non-Equilbrium Network Reconstruction, Phys. Rev. Lett., 106:048702

Aurell E., Ollion C., Roudi Y. (2010) Dynamics and performance of Susceptibility Propagation on synthetic data, Euro. Phys. J. B, 77:587

Roudi Y., Aurell E., Hertz J. (2009) Statistical physics of pairwise probability models, Front. in Comp. Neurosci., 3:22

Roudi Y., Tyrcha J., Hertz J. (2009) Ising Model for Neural Data: Model Quality and Approximate Methods for Extracting Functional Connectivity, Phys. Rev. E, 79, 051915

Roudi Y., Nirenberg S., Latham P. E. (2009) Pairwise maximum entropy models for studying large biological systems: when they can and when they can’t work, PLoS Comp. Biol., 5(5): e1000380.