Michael Okun

Weizmann Institute of Science,
76100 Rehovot, Israel.
Room 128, Benoziyo Building.

E-mail:

Phone:
+972 (8) 9344414

I am a postdoc in Dr. Ilan Lampl's lab at the Neurobiology department of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Before moving to the Weizmann Institute, I have completed a PhD in computer science at the MOSIX distributed computing lab,
in the Department of Computer Science of The Hebrew Univeristy of Jerusalem.

Papers

Neuroscience:

The subthreshold relation between cortical local field potential and neuronal firing unveiled by intracellular recordings in awake rats
Michael Okun, Amir Naim and Ilan Lampl,
Journal of Neuroscience 30(12), 4440-4448 (2010).

The V1 population gains normalization
Elad Ganmor, Michael Okun and Ilan Lampl,
An (invited) preview, Neuron 64(6), 778-780 (2009).

Balance of excitation and inhibition    [HTML]
Michael Okun and Ilan Lampl,
Scholarpedia 4(8), 7467 (2009).

On the dynamics of synaptic inputs during ongoing activity in the cortex
Michael Okun, Alik Mokeichev, Yonatan Katz and Ilan Lampl,
An (invited) chapter in Coherent Behavior in Neuronal Networks (Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience, vol. 3),
Eds. Josic, K.; Rubin, J.; Matias, M.; Romo, R, pp. 1-16, Springer 2009.

Instantaneous correlation of excitation and inhibition during ongoing and sensory-evoked activities    [PDF]
Michael Okun and Ilan Lampl,
Nature Neuroscience 11(5), 535-537 (2008).

Stochastic emergence of repeating cortical motifs in spontaneous membrane potential fluctuations in vivo   [PDF]
Alik Mokeichev, Michael Okun, Omri Barak, Yonatan Katz, Ohad Ben-Shahar and Ilan Lampl,
Neuron 53(3), 413-425 (2007).

Computer science:

On the round complexity of Byzantine agreement without initial set-up    [PS]
Michael Okun,
Information and Computation 207(12), 1351-1368 (2009).

Randomized gossip algorithms for maintaining a distributed bulletin board with guaranteed age properties
Lior Amar, Amnon Barak, Zvi Drezner and Michael Okun,
Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience 21(15), 1907-1927 (2009).

Renaming in synchronous message passing systems with Byzantine failures    [PS]
Michael Okun, Amnon Barak and Eli Gafni,
Distributed Computing 20(6), 403-413 (2008) (special issue dedicated to the DISC 20th anniversary).
See also Renaming in message passing systems with Byzantine failures   [PS]
Michael Okun and Amnon Barak,
Proc. 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), pp. 16-30, September 2006, Stockholm, Sweden.

Efficient algorithms for anonymous Byzantine agreement   [PS]
Michael Okun and Amnon Barak,
Theory of Computing Systems 42(2), 222-238 (2008).

Byzantine agreement   [PS]
Michael Okun,
An (invited) entry in Encyclopedia of Algorithms, Ed. Ming-Yang Kao, pp. 116-119, Springer 2008.

On the power of impersonation attacks    [PS]
Michael Okun,
Proc. 21st International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), pp. 494-495, September 2007, Lemesos, Cyprus.

An on-line algorithm for fair-share node allocations in a cluster
Lior Amar, Amnon Barak, Ely Levy and Michael Okun,
7th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid), pp. 83-91, May 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

On approximation of the vertex cover problem in hypergraphs   [PS]
Michael Okun,
Discrete Optimization 2(1), 101-111 (2005).

Agreement among unacquainted Byzantine generals   [PS]
Michael Okun,
Proc. 19th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), pp. 499-500, September 2005, Krakow, Poland.

Atomic Writes for data integrity and consistency in shared storage devices for clusters    [PS]
Michael Okun and Amnon Barak,
Future Generation Computer Systems 20(4), 539-547 (2004).
A preliminary version appeared in
Proc. 5th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP), pp. 286-292, October 2002, Beijing, China.

A new approach for approximating node deletion problems    [PS]
Michael Okun and Amnon Barak,
Information Processing Letters 88(5), 231-236 (2003).

On node state reconstruction for fault tolerant distributed algorithms    [PS]
Michael Okun and Amnon Barak,
21st Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), pp. 160-168, October 2002, Osaka, Japan.

Teaching

Instructor in the "in-vivo intracellular recording techniques" course (2006 and 2008, Otto Loewi Minerva center, Eilat)

At the Hebrew University I have been a teaching assistant (TA) in the following courses:

Introduction to Computer Science (Fall 2001).
Programming Laboratory (Fall 2002).
Introduction to Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems (Fall 2004).
Distributed Operating Systems (Fall 2005).
Cluster and Grid Super-computing (Fall 2003, Spring 2005, Spring 2006).
Parallel and Distributed Applications (Fall 2006).

Personal

Pictures from around the world