Dear Jon and Sheldon,

As you may remember, I was very interested in, and supportive of the idea
of an institute of cognitive science, when you mentioned such a suggestion
during your visit to one of the Engineering faculty meetings last year.

I have been preparing a new interdisciplinary course that I would like to
call "Vision Computation: from Neurons to Perception" to be offered this Fall.
A brief course description is attached at the end of this email. I thought 
this course would fall very well within the scope of the proposed institute 
of cognitive science. But I don't know if there is any further specific steps 
towards this suggestion currently being considered. What I would love to see 
is some further discussions about this suggestion by faculty members interested
in this idea. I learned from Margo about her uncertain future at HMC and
wonder if there is any effort in this regard.

To go with my new course mentioned above, I would also like to suggest a
series of talks surrounding the central theme of brain science. What I have in
mind is very similar to the talk series on "Origin of Life" that we currently
have in this semester. Brain science is by nature very exciting (some say it 
will be the next scientific break through in the 21 century, comparable to the 
relativity theory and quantum theory in this century), and highly 
interdisciplinary (involving various traditional disciplines such as biology,
psychology, computation, philosophy,  etc.). I think this would be a perfect
topic for a series of college-wide Wednesday evening talks in the Fall and I
am sure that such a series will be very attractive to HMC students as well as
the faculty. 

Through collaboration in the past years, I got to know Dr. Christoph Koch at
Caltech. He is the head of the CNS (Computational and Neural Systems) program 
at Caltech and is well recognized worldwide for his work in brain research in 
general and consciousness (with Francis Crick at Salk Institute, Nobel Prize 
winner for discovering DNA structure) in particular. He is very supportive of
my idea of a series of talks on brain science and is willing to be a speaker 
and to suggest many more distinguished speakers in the area. Another potential
speak would be Dr. Terrence Sejnowski, a well known computational 
neuroscientist at Salk Institute, who received our Wright Prize a few years 
ago. 

I wonder if you think the suggested series of talks on Brain Science is 
suitable for the college in the Fall. If so, we could start to plan for it,
to schedule the talks and to arrange the topics and to invite the speakers. 

Thanks,

Ruye Wang
Engineering Dept.

Attachment: 

A brief course description of "Vision Computation: from Neurons to Perception"

This is an interdisciplinary course in the Claremont Neuroscience Program,
covering the basic neurophysiology and psychophysics of vision, as part of 
the brain study, as well as the computational simulation and modeling of the 
visual signal processing at both the neuronal and perceptual levels. Various 
aspects of vision such as the perception of form, color, depth and motion are
discussed. Active learning is emphasized by computer demonstrations and 
projects, on- and off-line literature search, in-class discussion and 
presentation, as well as lecturing. The course is designed for all interested
students across Claremont Colleges of different background.

Prerequisites: calculus and basic training in programming.