Modelling the Somantic Electrical Response of Hippocampal Pyramidal Neurons

A modeling study of hippocampal pyramidal neurons is described. This study is based on simulations using HIPPO, a program which simulates the somatic electrical activity of these cells. HIPPO is based on a) descriptions of eleven non-linear conductances that have been either reported for this class of cell in the literature or postulated in the present study, and b) an approximation of the electrotonic structure of the cell that is derived in this thesis, based on data for the linear properties of these cells. HIPPO is used a) to integrate empirical data from a variety of sources on the electrical characteristics of this type of cell, b) to investigate the functional significance of the various elements that underly the electrical behavior, and c) to provide a tool for the electrophysiologist to supplement direct observation of these cells and provide a method of testing speculations regarding parameters that are not accessible.

Maygen: A Symbolic Debugger Generation System

With the development of high-level languages for new computer architectures comes the need for appropriate debugging tools as well. One method for meeting this need would be to develop, from scratch, a symbolic debugger with the introduction of each new language implementation for any given architecture. This, however, seems to require unnecessary duplication of effort among developers. This paper describes Maygen, a "debugger generation system," designed to efficiently provide the desired language-dependent and architecture-dependent debuggers. A prototype of the Maygen system has been implemented and is able to handle the semantically different languages of C and OPAL.

The Kineticist's Workbench: Combining Symbolic and Numerical Methods in the Simulation of Chemical Reaction Mechanisms

The Kineticist's Workbench is a program that simulates chemical reaction mechanisms by predicting, generating, and interpreting numerical data. Prior to simulation, it analyzes a given mechanism to predict that mechanism's behavior; it then simulates the mechanism numerically; and afterward, it interprets and summarizes the data it has generated. In performing these tasks, the Workbench uses a variety of techniques: graph- theoretic algorithms (for analyzing mechanisms), traditional numerical simulation methods, and algorithms that examine simulation results and reinterpret them in qualitative terms. The Workbench thus serves as a prototype for a new class of scientific computational tools---tools that provide symbiotic collaborations between qualitative and quantitative methods.