Simon Thorpe is CNRS Research Director (DRCE2), CerCo (CNRS-UT3), TMBI (Univ. Toulouse), France. His current interests are centered on understanding the phenomenal processing speed achieved by the visual system thanks to experiments that attempt to measure just how fast visual processing is using briefly flashed natural scenes using a combination of electrophysiological and behavioural methods. In an attempt to explain this sort of ultra-rapid processing he proposed a novel coding scheme that uses the order in which cells fire spikes, rather than firing rates to encode information.

Collaborative publications

I had the chance to meet Simon Thorpe thanks to my professor of applied mathematics at SUPAERO, Manuel Samuelides. He introduced me to the world of Spiking Neural Networks, and co-directerd my PhD. During this period, we published a series of papers, among which:

• Arnaud Delorme, Laurent U Perrinet, Simon Thorpe, Manuel Samuelides (2001). Network of integrate-and-fire neurons using Rank Order Coding B: spike timing dependant plasticity and emergence of orientation selectivity. Neurocomputing.

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• Laurent U Perrinet, Manuel Samuelides, Simon Thorpe (2004). Sparse spike coding in an asynchronous feed-forward multi-layer neural network using matching pursuit. Neurocomputing.

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• Laurent U Perrinet, Manuel Samuelides, Simon Thorpe (2004). Coding static natural images using spiking event times: do neurons cooperate?. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.

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