Simons Foundation

In this talk, Terry Hwa will explore the opportunities that exist at this new frontier using several examples at the molecular, cellular and population levels.

In this talk, Terry Hwa will explore the opportunities that exist at this new frontier using several examples at the molecular, cellular and population levels.

The first Neuroimaging Symposium focuses on diffusion tensor imaging — a magnetic resonance imaging technique used to study brain tissue design, especially white tracts, in both normal and diseased states.

This lecture has already taken place. To view slides from the lecture, visit the lecture page.

In this talk, Ila Fiete will argue that it is time to develop and apply information-theoretic principles specific to coding in the noisy brain.

In this talk, Ila Fiete will argue that it is time to develop and apply information-theoretic principles specific to coding in the noisy brain.

In this talk, Roger E. Summons outlines approaches to seeking evidence of life in Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks and shows, by analogy, how the Mars Science Laboratory mission is designed to investigate Mars’ capacity for supporting a biosphere.

No one knows when life first colonized planet Earth, nor if or when Mars ever supported life. We see numerous, unequivocal lines of evidence for life on Earth from some 3.5 billion years ago to the present day. But the further back in time we look, the more clues about our earliest ancestors are clouded by doubts, uncertainties and controversies.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland has performed spectacularly well in its first major running period: from December 2009 through February 2013. Data of unprecedented quality and quantity have been recorded for proton-proton collisions at energies of 7 and 8 trillion electron volts — the highest energies ever obtained.

In this talk, Joe Incandela will present an overview of the LHC physics program, including highlights from the discovery of a Higgs boson and a summary of more recent studies that incorporate more data. He will briefly discuss expectations for future results in years to come.

This Biotech Symposium will focus on computational methods for detecting structural variants, which include large chromosomal insertions, deletions, inversions and translocations.

This Biotech Symposium will focus on computational methods for detecting structural variants, which include large chromosomal insertions, deletions, inversions and translocations.

L. Mahadevan will explain how a combination of biological and physical experiments, together with mathematical models and computations, begin to unravel the physical basis for morphogenesis. He will go on to explore how these pan-disciplinary problems enrich the origins of this topic, creating new questions in mathematics, physics and biology.

L. Mahadevan will explain how a combination of biological and physical experiments, together with mathematical models and computations, begin to unravel the physical basis for morphogenesis. He will go on to explore how these pan-disciplinary problems enrich the origins of this topic, creating new questions in mathematics, physics and biology.

New evidence of exoplanets reveals a higher-than-expected occurrence of potentially habitable worlds in our galactic neighborhood. What does this evidence tell us about life on other planets? How can we search for signs of life on other planets?

New evidence of exoplanets reveals a higher-than-expected occurrence of potentially habitable worlds in our galactic neighborhood. What does this evidence tell us about life on other planets? How can we search for signs of life on other planets?

This Biotech Symposium will focus on perspectives on big data in biology from leading practitioners in the field.

Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) is a new paradigm that uses an intelligent agent (a ‘nontrivial teacher’) to supplement standard training data in the context of supervised learning algorithms. Rather than using standard, brute-force methods to address the general problem of inference and the construction of intelligent machines, the LUPI learning model allows the teacher to add additional (privileged) information to the training examples.

In this lecture, Gerald Joyce focuses on the perpetuation of genetic information as a defining characteristic of life. He draws a connection between digital computers (von Neumann machines), especially those with the capacity to self-reproduce, and molecular Darwinian systems that maintain heritable ‘bits’ of information, which are refined through evolution.

In this lecture, Gerald Joyce focuses on the perpetuation of genetic information as a defining characteristic of life. He draws a connection between digital computers (von Neumann machines), especially those with the capacity to self-reproduce, and molecular Darwinian systems that maintain heritable ‘bits’ of information, which are refined through evolution.

In recent decades, physicists and astronomers have discovered two beautiful standard models, one for the quantum world of extremely short distances and one for the universe as a whole. Both models have had spectacular success, but there are also strong arguments for new physics beyond these models.

Probabilistic topic models provide a suite of tools for analyzing large collections of electronic documents. A traditional topic model analyzes a collection of documents to discover its hidden themes.  These themes can be used to organize, visualize, summarize and navigate the collection. Many collections are associated with corresponding reader behavior data, which is useful both for making predictions about readers (such as which articles they will like) and in understanding patterns in how they read.