Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/15/2017
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location
Nanoscale Research Facility Room 115

Categories No Categories

Dear Neurotech Dinner Community,
Monday we will have 2 speakers who will each talk about their own (different) recently announced and exciting DARPA-funded (~$4.2M/each) effort.

The DARPA Program is called: DARPA announced the Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT)
It is focused on enlisting the body’s peripheral nervous system to achieve something that has long been considered the brain’s domain alone: facilitation of learning. Work on TNT has now begun. The crux of the wide-ranging program is to identify optimal and safe neurostimulation methods for activating “synaptic plasticity”—a natural process in the brain, pivotal to learning, that involves the strengthening or weakening of the junctions between two neurons—then build those methods into enhanced training regimens that accelerate the acquisition of cognitive skills.
http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-04-26

2 of the 8 funded programs are at UF:

• Kevin Otto will briefly introduce his “Cognitive Augmentation through Neuroplasticity” project.
• Karim Oweiss will briefly introduce his “Optimized Learning via Peripheral Nerve Stimulation” project.

Here is the UF news article written by our own Michelle Jaffee
“UF receives up to $8.4 million from DoD to study brain training using electric stimulation”
http://news.ufl.edu/articles/2017/04/uf-receives-up-to-84-million-from-dod-to-study-brain-training-using-electric-stimulation.php

The two of them did a REDDIT session:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6ajjkh/science_ama_series_were_karim_oweiss_kevin_otto/

Hope you will join us!
– Jack W. Judy