Fundamental gaps remain in our understanding of animal brains, especially human brains, in comparison with other organ systems in the body. One of these gaps is our very partial knowledge of the circuit architecture of brains, even in the best studied model organisms.
Analyzing the collective behavior and social interactions of hundreds of millions of people with powerful computational techniques offers a radically new perspective on fundamental questions in the social sciences.
This talk discusses progress in developing devices that can restore lost functions of the nervous system following disease or injury, in particular the development of a brain computer interface (BCI) that is designed to restore independence and control for people with paralysis.
The evolution of organisms requires the generation of some diversity in the offspring and then the selection of the fittest in the present environment from among this diversity in the population. The rates of evolution can be influenced by mutation rates that are in turn influenced by a wide variety of stresses that can occur as sperm or eggs are produced or even as the organism develops.
This talk is based on mathematical and computational studies of neural network models. Understanding the range of dynamic phenomena in such models provides a basis for thinking about the more complex dynamics of real neural circuits.
This talk describes experimental progress toward controlling quantum mechanical coherence and entanglement in a solid-state environment.
Nima Arkani-Hamed's research has shown how the extreme weakness of gravity, relative to other forces of nature, might be explained by the existence of extra dimensions of space, and how the structure of comparatively low-energy physics is constrained within the context of string theory.
Condensed matter physics has evolved greatly in recent years from studying bulk properties of naturally occurring materials to constructing complex materials and systems not found in nature, and to controlling rather than observing quantum mechanics. This dramatic broadening has been accompanied by corresponding advancement in experimental and theoretical tools. Diversification has enriched the subject greatly...
The 2012 Analysis of Boolean Functions workshop focused mainly on application areas in theoretical computer science, including: Hardness of approximation Property testing Pseudorandomness Concrete complexity Computational learning theory The symposium included some traditional talks on recent results, but its aim was also to encourage research through a variety of talk/discussion formats: group exploration of new...
While significant progress has been made on key cosmological questions, many remain unanswered: What happened during the first moments of the big bang? What is dark energy? What were the properties of the first stars?
Classically, arithmetic is the study of rational or integral solutions of diophantine equations and geometry the study of lines and conics. From the modern standpoint, these areas are synthesized in the study of rational and integral points on algebraic varieties over nonclosed fields. A major insight of the 20th century was that the arithmetic properties...
A talk on recent advances in methods and instrumentation that combine genetically encoded molecular sensors, optical imaging and virtual-reality systems to measure neural-circuit dynamics in the mouse brain during virtual navigation and decision making.
Most sensory stimuli in the natural world exhibit strong statistical regularities. A proposed general principle of sensory neuroscience is that the brain’s circuitry is designed to take advantage of these statistical regularities.
In recent years, homological knot invariants have been gaining momentum in both mathematics and physics, and recent developments promise it will only be growing. Therefore, a symposium on “the physics of knot homologies” is very timely. Moreover, this subject is intimately connected with another active area of research at the interface of geometry and physics:...
The mind and brain can be thought of as computational systems — but what kinds of computations do they carry out, and what kinds of mathematics can best characterize these computations? Josh Tenenbaum attempts to answer these questions through the integration of disparate branches of mathematics and paradigms of computation.
The talk describes (dis)similarity distances between pairs of two-dimensional surfaces (embedded in three-dimensional space) that use both local structures and global information in the surfaces.
Organizers: Sanjeev Arora, Uriel Feige, Michel Goemans & David Shmoys Many of the striking advances in theoretical computer science over the past two decades concern approximation algorithms, which compute provably near-optimal solutions to NP-hard optimization problems. Yet the approximability of several fundamental problems such as TSP, Graph Coloring, Graph Partitioning etc. remains an open question. For...
Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to identify consistent functional patterns in neurotypical individuals, as well as changes in neurologic and psychiatric diseases.
Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to identify consistent functional patterns in neurotypical individuals, as well as changes in neurologic and psychiatric diseases.
February 3-9, 2013 The goal of our meeting will be to explore exotic quantum states of matter, with a particular focus on the role of quantum entanglement. A variety of new tools arising from both the study of quantum field theoretic techniques in condensed matter physics, and from the "holographic" duality between field theories and...
Probability theory was devised in order to understand gambling, but now is the underpinning of statistics, without which we would be clueless in our complex society. Yet probability itself is a mysterious quantity, hard to define, and awkward for our human intuition to cope with. Does it even exist, except in our minds?
