Keynote Sessions
KALPANA MARGABANDHU
Wednesday, December 8th at 9:30am
Rooms: Trinity 1 & 2
Kalpana has 28 years of industry experience and has been with IBM for last 17 years. she is the Director of WebSphere Development, in IBM India Software Lab. She is a co-chair for WIT Executive Steering Committee, Member of the Global Women’s Council, GMT (Growth Market Team) Ambassadors for Gender Diversity, Member of the India Leadership Forum and also participates in external Women’s forum like NASSCOM , CII.
Kalpana has received several awards in recognition of her leadership with the India Software Lab, and was named the recipient of the IT People Award for Women Leadership in 2007 and the Women In Leadership (WILL) Women’s Choice Award in 2008.
She is also on the Board of IBM India.
_________________________________________________________________________
Sorting Sounds: Uncovering Brain Mechanisms for Sound Categorization
Keynote Speaker: NANDINI CHATTERJEE SINGH
National Brain Research Center
Thursday, December 9th at 9:30am
Rooms: Trinity 1 & 2
Abstract:
Imagine a computer that can read, process faces and voices in an instant, and solve your daughter’ s problems on the fly, all while consuming just 8 watts of power. How can studying the ultimate computing device, namely the human brain help us build such a dream computer. From the brain arise processes such as perception, action, cognition, emotion and interaction, the most important of which is cognition, believed to reside in the cerebral cortex.
Over the last decade I have traveled from being a physicist to a cognitive neuroscientist – trying to understand how sounds transform into meaning. Sounds in the natural environment form an important class of biologically relevant signals. I will discuss, how a dynamic spectral measure to characterize the spectral dynamics turned into a cognitive sound recognized by the brain. Simple sounds with slowly varying spectral dynamics were identified as animal sounds while complex sounds sounds with rapidly varying spectral dynamics transformed to speech. Functional neuroimaging experiments to study the processing of these sounds by human subjects showed that distinct cortical areas process sounds from different categories. Our results suggest cognitive processing of spectral dynamics as a possible scheme to categorize sounds in the brain.
Bio:
Nandini Singh was trained as a physicist in non-linear dynamics and chaos from the University of Pune. She worked on some aspects of experimental chaos at Ohio University. She then moved to on to computational neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, where she worked as a post doctoral fellow with Frederic Theunissen and studies birdsong learning. She returned to India in the fall of 2002 and joined NBRC where she is pursuing research in the following areas
• Language and central auditory processing
• Language and learning disabilities
• Structure and representation of sound
An example of Dr. Singh’s current research areas is a study of cognition in the learning of languages. Was the brain wired to learn a single language? If so, does learning multiple languages come at a cost? Research on the bilingual brain suggests otherwise – in fact recent studies on bilinguals suggest that speaking more than one language may have cognitive benefits that extend from childhood into old age.
Bilingualism and in fact multilingualism is the norm in the Indian sub-continent. A large population not only speaks two languages but our educational system also requires that children learn to read two languages written in different scripts (Hindi in Devanagari and English in Roman for example).
Using a combination of behaviour and functional neuroimaging techniques (fMRI) her laboratory is focused on studying how the brain organizes language in bilingual individuals and how the brain develops cortical pathways to read two distinct scripts.