Participant Testimonials
Yes, it impacted my research. I also made some new contacts with whom I may start a collaboration. It also enabled me to connect some of my work with some other work that I did not see as being connected.
This was an excellent workshop, that resulted in several specific ideas and directions for new research. It was one on the best meetings I've attended.
The workshop was certainly great, very well organized, and I enjoyed having great conversations with the organizers and other participants. I have certainly got new ideas after this workshop, and I will acknowledge BIRS in my next future publications as one important source of inspiration in my work. ... looking forward to visiting BIRS in the near future!
My postdoc had an opportunity to present her work to an exceedingly engaged audience - she got what must have been 30 questions in a 30 minute talk, and walked away with a page of ideas for next steps. That would have been worth the trip alone. Also, my graduate student received an immersion in mathematical neuroscience with a net value equal to many months of reading, in 5 days alone. Overall, the meeting was certainly the best week of science I can remember - controversies at the interface of computation, theory, and experiment were debated with an openness that would be hard to realize in any standard setting I've experienced in my career. The result is - as for many participants, I am sure - a long list of ideas to pursue, and new connections. As soon as I finish this testimonial, I am going to move along with two new collaborations myself, both focussing on the role of instabilities and near-instabilities (criticality) in neural networks, both started at Banff.
