Project BoBo (Boston-Bologna) was born in June 2003, from a newly established collaboration between the Brain and Vision Research Laboratory (Boston University-BME, Neuroscience, and Neurology), University of Bologna (Facolta di Scienze Motorie and Istituto di Fisiologia Umana e Generale), and Ospedale S. Orsola-Malpighi. Continuation of Project BoBo is made possible by a research grant from the Fondazione Carisbo, Bologna.

What is BoBo? Using psychophysics and analytical tools of behavioral and neuroimaging data analysis. We study visual motion perception in stroke patients. Our interests are to determine: (1) how visual motion deficits impact our motor performance, in particular navigation; (2) how visual motion deficits cluster; and (3) how visual motion performance relates to the site and the side of the patient's lesion.

One of the exciting outcomes of BoBo is a symposium to be held December 12-15, 2003 in Bologna, and two tutorials: one on fMRI methods and the other on computational neurophysiology. Please look soon for more exciting outcomes, such as scientific papers coauthored by the members of BoBo research group.

	Prof. Lucia M. Vaina, M.D., Ph.D. Project BoBo Co-director Lucia "commuted" between Bologna and Boston (Boston being her main base). Creator of Project BoBo, she enjoys clinical neuroscience work as much in Bologna as in Boston. Between 2003-2005 she has fostered rewarding collaborations with Bologna's Department of Human and General Physiology, Medical School, Faculty of Motor Sciences, and Ospedale S. Orsola-Malpighi. All this was possible thanks to an award from the Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica Italiano (MURST) under the program Rientro dei Cervelli, that she held between 2003-2005. Now these collaborations successfully continue thanks to a grant from the Fondazione Carisbo-Bologna, between 2005-2007. Through "skype" Lucia directs the development of new experiments at Bologna, and in Boston she tests them and together with the Brain and Vision Research Laboratory she studies selective deficits on these tests in stroke patients.
	Prof. Salvatore Squatrito, M.D. Project BoBo Co-director Who made it all possible! Salvatore has done elegant physiological studies on the parietal visual system of our "cousin" the macaque monkey, but now he has moved to the motor system and motor sciences. He is the President of la Facoltà di Scienze Motorie. The plan is to sue the tests developed under BoBo to study learning of normal subjects, and compare performance of normal subjects with that of sports trained subjects on tests such as detection of time-to-collision and visual-motor tasks.
	Gabriella Pandiani, M.D. The pilar of neuropsychological assessment of stroke patients in the Padiglione Albertoni-Reparto Alleanti of rehabilitation. Gabriella's enthusiasm for the project is contagious, and her expertise much needed.
	Maria Grazia Maioli Who makes sure all details that matter are taken care of and that BoBo rolls happily forward. Without her it would be hard to keep the dynamism of the group.
	Prof. Renato Campanini, Ph.D. Professor of Physics at the University of Bologna and working on imaging. He is the one who keeps a formal eye on Danilo's progress and makes sure he does not fall asleep in the magnet or modeling cortical connectivity (known to happen).
	Danilo Dongiovanni, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Research Associate, Brain and Vision Research Laboratory, Boston University and Department of Physics, University of Bologna, Italy. Modelling functional brain connectivity using fMRI data.
	Leonardo Sassi, M.S. Senior Programmer who develops virtual reality experiments in spatial navigation and spatial cognition.
Scott Beardsley, Ph.D. Finn Calabro Elif Sikoglu Sergei Soloviev, M.S. Robert Pitts, Ph.D. Members of the Brain and Vision Research Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Program in Neuroscience at Boston University. Without them Project BoBo would just have been an optical and cognitive illusion.
	Anna Minguzzi, Ph.D. Oscillating between motion-emotions, motion-learning and music.
	Andrea Ballabeni, Ph.D. A rare bird! Neural modeler at heart and physiologist by trade. He'll soon hit the real world of employment.

DECEMBER 16
TUTORIAL and MINI-SYMPOSIUM: COMPUTATIONAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF VISION

Organizers:	Lucia M. Vaina (USA & Italy)
	Salvatore Squatrito (Italy)
	Claudio Galletti (Italy)

TUTORIAL: COMPUTATIONAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY

9:00-1:00pm	Scott Beardsley (USA) Computational neurophysiology of vision--coding and decoding in the visual system.
Lunch-Individual

MINI-SYMPOSIUM: SAMPLING COMPUTATIONAL VISION

3:00-4:30pm	Key Note Speaker: Klaus-Peter Hoffmann (Germany) Cortical and subcortical structures in vision.
4:30-5:00pm	Coffee break
5:00-5:45pm	Peter Földiák (UK) and Sergei Soloviev (USA) Temporal coherence for the unsupervised learning of coordinate transformations.
5:45-6:30pm	Martin Giese (Germany) Learning representations of biological movements in brains and machines.
6:30-7:15pm	Scott Beardsley (USA) Symmetric complex motion perception in a biased neural representation.
7:30-8:00pm	Computational storming