Facilities

Location

The Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience (SCCN), a center of the Institute for Neural Computation (INC) of the University of California San Diego, (UC San Diego) is located in a 4000-sq.ft. wing of the new UC San Diego Supercomputer Center. extension space in the NW portion of the UC San Diego campus. The Center has desk space for up to 50 researchers, technicians, and administrative staff. (Directions to Center). Scott Makeig directs the Center; Tzyy-Ping Jung is the Associate Director. The Center was founded in 2001-2002 by a continuing gift from The Swartz Foundation (Old Field, NY) on the initiative of UC San Diego Institute for Neural Computation founding director, Terrence Sejnowski.

Goal

The Center's goal is to observe and model how functional activities in multiple brain areas interact dynamically to support human cognition, creativity and social interaction. Research is continuing in several areas including advancing neural computation on human electrophysiological data, advances that are incorporated into our EEGLAB signal processing environment.

Equipment

SCCN has several 256-channel and 128-channel Biosemi Active Two active-electrode EEG recording systems. One system is rapidly configurable either as a 256-channel system for a single subject or as two up to 136-channel systems for recording from two subjects simultaneously. Currently, SCCN has three EEG laboratories. The Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) laboratory (8x9m) and the Contained Environment Simulator (CES) laboratory are equipped with PhaseSpace motion capture systems plus multichannel audio (speakers) and (MoBI) visual screen & projectors for delivering experiment instructions, stimuli and feedback. Sophisticated Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) and SNAP (Simulation and Neuroscience Application Programming) software environments by Christian Kothe allow ready programming of a very wide range of paradigms involving high-density EEG recording combined with body and eye movement tracking, audio and video recording, ground force recording, etc. A third laboratory space is used for testing new wearable EEG and MoBI systems. UC San Diego fMRI and MEG facilities are also available for research uses.

Computation

We develop and maintain the EEGLAB computing environment for electrophysiological data analysis. SCCN has a network of workstations running Linux and Windows, plus 100 TB of online storage, all interconnected by gigabit Ethernet and by UCSD and SDSC WiFi. Two large computational clusters allow efficient performance of large computations. SDSC supercomputers are also available for our use.