This course is intended to be organized as projects by individuals or small groups in which a system model is designed and possibly implemented for some aspect or subsystem of the primate brain.

The approach and method will be based on the instructor's current system model of the primate neocortex which is described on his web site http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~ bond.
There is a special brain modeling language available for constructing such models.

The course website includes a list of suggested projects.
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~ bond/cs286/coursegs.html
A project consists of reading research papers about a particular part of the primate brain and then developing a design for a system level model of it. It is possible to do a systems analysis and system design without doing a computer implementation.

Students from biology as well as computer science are welcome.
Biological background for computer scientists will be arranged by reading appropriate papers. The course website includes a list of topics which can be used for reading or for a weekly discussion meeting.

For biologists, and computer scientists, programming can be done in a special rule-based language developed by the instructor which allows system models to be constructed and tested easily.