Caroline Casey - Week 3 - Complex Systems Group: Visualizations and Lectures - University of Pennsylvania

My third week in the lab was very eventful and exciting! This week consisted of lectures in the morning and working on my project in the afternoon (like last week).

The two lectures on Monday were given by Victor, an electrical engineering post-doc and Qawi, a post-doc who spoke about his past research on the neural networks of monkeys. The lectures were extremely interesting and provided more examples of how useful networks are in every field of science. Victor's research deals a lot with the mathematical part of networks. He examines how the structure and dynamics of networks can be manipulated in order to prevent the spread of diseases and in order to improve marketing for various companies. Qawi examines the network science of monkeys who drink alcohol. He examined the changes in network structure as a result of alcohol. Both lectures were incredibly interesting and informative!

On Monday afternoon, I went through many manipulations in Matlab in order to create adjacency matrices for the four scenarios which included only the significant edge weight values that I found last week after finding the significant p-values. After working through those matrices and obtaining a list of the 3D coordinates of the nodes (the brain regions), I created a 3D network of a brain for each scenario! It was so exciting to see all the computations I've been doing for the past few weeks come together as neural networks!

This is one of the 3D neural networks I created.

Tuesday morning, I was lucky enough to listen to two more intriguing lectures. The first lecture was given by Ankit, a post-doc at another lab at Penn who examines epilepsy as a network disorder. He looks at the changes in network structures when epileptic patients undergo a seizure. The second lecture was given by Sandra who works at the Annenberg School of Communication at Penn and examines networks and political discontent. She aims to understand more about how information diffuses through the use of social media. 

On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Bassett arranged for me and two other visiting students to take a tour of the Nanoscale Quantum Engineering Lab at Penn! I was so amazed by the research being conducted as well as all the technology involved, it was a really great experience. I spent the rest of my afternoon analyzing the neural networks I created by looking at community structure and modularity in the graphs.

I listened to two more lectures on Wednesday morning. The first lecture was given by Erol who works at the Department of Biology at Penn and uses game theory of different organism interaction scenarios in order to create networks that describe the outcomes of the different scenarios. He uses the networks in order to explain the benefits of cooperation between different organisms. The second lecture was given by Sarah, a post-doc in Dr. Bassett's lab. Sarah spoke about her research in a previous lab where she examined structural synchrony in the neural networks of epileptic patients. She particularly examined interictal spikes, which are synchronous spikes that occur in-between seizures in people with epilepsy. The lectures by Erol and Sarah explained how useful networks are in helping visualize and simplify data.

In the afternoon, I continued to examine community structure within the neural networks I created and started to analyze specific differences I noticed between the networks as well as what brain regions they involved. I was out on Thursday.

I am very excited to keep examining the neural networks I created and to see what meaningful information I can draw from them!