Team Members

Topographica is developed by a distributed team of researchers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe, most recently including:

James A. Bednar, Lead author and project manager, 2002 -

Jim is a Reader at the University of Edinburgh. Parts of Topographica were inspired by Jim’s C++ LISSOM simulator in use from 1995-2004, but Topographica was entirely reimplemented in Python for extensibility and generality. Jim reviews all code and is the last word on the design and features.

Chris Ball, 2005 -

Chris was the main developer from 2005 - 2012, working on nearly every part of Topographica. He was also a PhD student in Edinburgh, working on the formation of color maps in V1.

Jan Antolik, 2006 -

Jan completed his University of Edinburgh PhD thesis in Autumn 2010, focusing on complex cells and surround modulation in V1. He continues to use Topographica in his postdoctoral work and has contributed a variety of related code.

Ignotas Sulzenko, 2014-2015

Ignotas is working on GP-GPU support for Topographica, as part of his undergraduate project.

Alessio Plebe, 2010 -

Alessio is an Associate Professor at the University of Messina, Italy, and contributes code for analyzing higher-order feature maps.

Philipp J. F. Rudiger, 2011 -

Philipp completed his MSc degree at the University of Edinburgh, working on RF measurement protocols for two-photon Calcium imaging in ferrets and is now pursuing his PhD on feedback, attention and contextual processing in V1 using Topographica models. He has contributed extensively to Topographica, particularly in the HoloViews and ImaGen submodules.

Jean-Luc Stevens, 2011 -

Jean-Luc received an MSc degree from the University of Edinburgh (project: A temporal model of neural activity and VSD response in the primary visual cortex) and is now a PhD student in Edinburgh working on temporal processing in V1 using Topographica models. He has contributed extensively to Topographica, particularly in the Lancet, HoloViews, and ImaGen submodules.

Previous contributors

James Adwick, 2008 - 2009

James completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project of building Unreal and Blender 3D-world interfaces for Topographica.

Wiktor Brodlo, 2012 - 2013

Wiktor helped integrate the submodules into which Topographica was split, as part of his undergraduate project.

Andy Cameron, 2008 - 2009

Andy completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project of building Matlab interfaces for Topographica.

Yoonsuck Choe, 2002 -

Yoonsuck is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University. He implemented preliminary spiking neuron support, primarily for integrate-and-fire neurons, and also contributed significantly to the web site and other graphical design.

Julien Ciroux, 2005 - 2006

Julien received an MSc from the University of Edinburgh (topic: modeling the McCollough effect in LISSOM). He implemented the plotting subsystem in 0.8.2 and other GUI-related functions.

Foivos Demertzis, 2006 - 2007

Foivos completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project of developing more sample models for Topographica.

Judah De Paula, 2004 - 2006

Judah completed his PhD at the University of Texas (topic: modeling the development of color maps in LISSOM). He was responsible for the initial Windows support, and implemented the first complete plotting and related GUI code.

Marco Elver, 2010 - 2011

Marco completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project on analyzing and optimizing for single-processor and multi-core operation.

Célia Fillion, May - September 2010

In an undergraduate project in collaboration with ISEN Brest (France), Célia implemented real-time OpenCV web camera support.

Tobias Fischer, 2014

As part of his MSc project, Tobias implemented a submodel system that allows individual models to be constructed from a recipe, by mixing and matching components according to a simple specification.

Gautham Ganapathy, May - Dec 2011

Gautham completed his MSc at the University of Edinburgh, including a project on realistic lateral connectivity in V1.

Kateryna Gerasymova, May - September 2008

In a MSc-level project in collaboration with Humboldt University (Berlin), Kateryna implemented numerous separate and joint maps and analysis routines, e.g. for direction, ocular dominance, and color.

Boris Hristov, 2012 - 2013

Boris built an improved test suite for Topographica, as part of his undergraduate project.

John Jacob, Jan - Aug 2009

John completed his MSc degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project of implementing a prototype of the compute-intensive portions of Topographica on a GP-GPU.

Bilal Khan, 2009 - 2011

Bilal developed audio file support and auditory system models for Topographica, first as part of his undergraduate project and then as part of his MRes project at the University of Edinburgh.

Konstantin Kudryavtsev, 2009 - 2011

Konstantin implemented MPI support for Topographica as part of his undergraduate and MSc theses at the University of Edinburgh.

Veldri Kurniawan, Jan - Aug 2006

Veldri completed his MSc degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project of evaluating models for homeostatic plasticity, and contributing code for homeostatic rules.

Judith Law, 2005 - 2011

Judith completed her University of Edinburgh PhD thesis in Autumn 2009, focusing on homeostasis and species differences in V1. Judith contributed tuning curve support and various GUI improvements.

Alan Lindsay, 2005 - 2006

As part of his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, Alan developed the Model Editor, a graphical interface for specifying Topographica models by selecting and connecting pre-defined components.

Louise Mathews, 2005 - 2006

As part of her undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, Louise implemented sample models of visual cortex maps published by other research groups.

Risto Miikkulainen, Principal investigator, 2002 - 2005

Risto is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, and worked with Jim on the original NIH proposal.

Chris Palmer, 2005 - 2009

Chris completed his University of Edinburgh PhD thesis about spatial frequency representations in V1 in 2009, contributing receptive field plotting support and other analysis code.

Ruaidhri Primrose, September 2006 - May 2007

Ruaidrhi completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project of developing more sample models for Topographica.

Jefferson Provost, 2002 - 2008

Jeff worked on Topographica as a postdoctoral researcher in the Neuroscience Department at the University of Pittsburgh, and earlier at the University of Texas at Austin. He wrote the initial GUI implementation (first in Scheme, then in Python), and the first Python version of most of the base classes (Sheet, CFSheet, CFSOM, Parameterized, LISSOM, etc.), plus support for robotics interfacing and for non-uniform projection mappings.

Tikesh Ramtohul, Jan - Aug 2006

Tikesh completed his MSc degree at the University of Edinburgh, including a project of building a model of disparity selectivity in V1, and contributed code for measuring disparity maps.

Keith Robertson, 2012 - 2013

Keith expanded expanding the Tk GUI support for Topographica, focusing on the Model Editor, as part of his undergraduate project.

Yiu Fai Sit, May 2005 - 2006

Sit was a PhD student at the University of Texas, focusing on hierarchical visual cortex models and characterizing the V1 optical imaging response to visual patterns. He was responsible for making the first Topographica implementation of LISSOM match the previous C++ version, and for writing C code to optimize key Topographica functions.

Giacomo Spigler, 2014

As part of his MSc project, Giacomo added multi-channel support to ImaGen, allowing RGB (and other multichannel inputs) to be generated and manipulated more easily.

Aistis Stankevicius, 2010 - 2011

Aistis completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, and is now an MSc/PhD student in Edinburgh. He worked on a GP-GPU prototype and contributed Cython and code coverage support.

Dobromir Stefanov, 2011 - 2012

As part of Dobromir’s undergraduate project at the University of Edinburgh, he performed major reorganization and cleanup of Topographica’s structure.

Stuart Wilson, 2007 - 2010

Stuart completed his MSc degree at the University of Edinburgh in 2007, and is now doing a joint PhD project with the University of Sheffield on rodent barrel cortex maps. He contributed barrel cortex modelling examples and analysis code.

Chen (Roger) Zhao, 2006 - 2011

Roger completed his PhD thesis about face aftereffects at the University of Edinburgh, and contributed face-related code to Topographica. He also helped out with Mac OS X support.