There are around 100,000 neurons under a mm^2 of cerebral cortex and about one billion synapses. Thalamic inputs to the cortex carry information that is transformed by local microcircuits of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. In recent years there has been an explosion of discoveries about the anatomical organization of the micrcircuits and the physiolgical properties of the neurons and synapses that compose them. The goal of this workshop is to explore the functional implications of these new findings and in particular to attempt to characterize the elementary computational operations that are performed in different layers of cortex.