Events
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Description
This is a week-long intensive school on the biology and mathematics of memory. Topics covered will be: synaptic plasticity, memory recall and consolidation, hippocampal and cortical models and more. This school is appropriate for graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and advanced researchers.
Organizers
CRM -
Description
It is our great pleasure to announce the workshop (http://www.bioforphys.org/) to be held in Barcelona on the 15th-18th January 2017 entitled ¨Biology for Physics: is there new physics in living matter?¨ . The workshop is organized under the auspices of the Division of Physics for Life Sciences from the European Physical Society, and will be held at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) on the beautiful Barcelona seashore.
Since the dawn of modern science, physics has developed the measurement tools for quantitative inquiry, and provided mathematical laws to describe and understand the world around us. In turn, physical methods have traditionally found fruitful applications in chemistry and biology. In the current century, it is not exaggerated to say that biology has been the fastest developing science, but it is also not less true that physics and chemistry contributions have been essential to make biology the quantitative science it is nowadays. However, despite all this progress, living matter has astonishing features that, when confronted to those of inanimate matter, make physicists suspect that they are missing something in their current understanding of the living. This leads us to pose the question: is there new physics in living matter?
The workshop brings about 20 prominent scientists (http://www.bioforphys.org/invited-speakers-1) who have been working over the past years on several biologically motivated problems, have made outstanding contributions in their respective fields and for whom physics is an everyday source of inspiration to better understand biology. This workshop is a forum where recent scientific results are presented by our invitees but dressed in a way to convey the audience with a personal view on the aforementioned questions and to trigger discussion and reflection on it. The workshop will debate questions such as: Is physics just providing useful methods and tools for biology? Is biology just providing useful problems and paradigms for physical thinking? Or is there more to it? Is it reasonable to expect the advent of new physical laws or principles emerging from biological studies? Is biology going to unveil a deep nexus with physics one day, as chemistry already did a century ago? The contents of the workshop are organized under the umbrella of a few selected themes all sharing the underlying playground of nonequilibrium physics which is at the core of living matter. Topics will include emergent properties in physical biology (from pattern formation to cellular differentiation), cell and tissue mechanics, morphogenesis, single molecule biophysics and stochastic thermodynamics, evolutionary physics, information theory and biology, among others.
In addition to the invited talks the workshop will have 8 oral contributions selected by the Organizing committee and the DPL scientific member board on the basis of scientific originality and interest, plus ample time devoted for poster exhibitions by participants and researchers to promote exchanges and interaction between them and our invited speakers. Moreover two prizes will be awarded to the best selected posters. The workshop is a great opportunity for young researchers who want to have a broad overview on the current most relevant topics in biophysics that are reshaping our way to understand the physical and biological world.
We can only accept a limited number of participants to this event and therefore we encourage you to submit a poster contribution by November 20, 2016 at the latest (http://www.bioforphys.org/abstract-submission) or participate by registering (http://www.bioforphys.org/registration). Contributions and and participants will be accepted according to the order of registration until the maximum number of participants (about 150) is reached.Organizers
UB, IBEC, PRBB -
Description
Avalanche phenomena occur in many different physical systems ranging from microscopic to macroscopic scales. Many materials respond to smooth continuous driving forces in a discontinuous, intermittent and stochastic way. Paradigmatic examples within condensed matter are Barkhausen noise in ferromagnets, acoustic emission in martensitic transitions, and the collapse of porous materials under pressure. These responses show interesting similarities with geophysical processes like earthquakes or real snow avalanches, with biophysical systems like neural networks and even with phenomena within plasma physics. In many cases the responses show a certain degree of criticality, with absence of characteristic scales, and power-law decays of the temporal and spatial correlations. The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to adopt an holistic point of view and try to find general common rules and trends linking these, a priori, very different processes.
Organizers
CRM - 2016
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Speaker
Stuart Semple (University of Roehampton); Iván González Torre (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)Description
Communication underpins the social behaviour of humans, and of our primate relatives, including learning and teaching. While language is unique to our own species, the other primates have complex repertoires of acoustical calls, which they use to convey diverse messages. In the other hand, the study of linguistic laws is usually restricted to written text where we previously have segmented the acoustical signal. Scripture is a technology that implies a transcription of the acoustical waves. However, this segmentation is a current topic of research not well defined in the case of oral corpora.
Actually, how can we compare human language with other communication systems if we do not compare the same kind of signals? How can we approach to the theoretical study of communication systems without falling into anthropocentrism?
In the first seminar, “Investigating communication in our primate relatives: from information content to linguistic laws”, Stuart Semple will describe a range of studies on primate communication that he and his collaborators have conducted. Stuart Semple will talk about work investigating the information content and function of primates’ vocalizations, the role that bystanders can play in shaping the outcome of communicative interactions, and the correlates of primate vocal repertoire size. He will also describe his most recent work, testing whether patterns consistent with linguistic laws - specifically Zipf’s law of abbreviation and Menzerath’s law - are found in the vocal (and gestural) communication of monkeys and apes.
In the second seminar, “Exploring linguistic laws in human voice”, Iván González Torre will talk about a new mathematical method proposed to transform generic acoustic signals into a sequence of symbols describing speech energy fluctuations. With this transformation we can explore linguistic laws such as Zipf’s law, Heap’s law and Brevity law without requiring a transcription of the signals, as usual in computational linguistics, and offering a new approach to the problem of segmentation in the study of communication systems.
PLEASE NOTE that assistance is FREE but you must register at this link.
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Speaker
Oleguer Sagarra Pascual, DRIBIADescription
Complex networks grow subject to structural constraints which affect their measurable properties. Assessing the effect that such constraints impose on their observables is thus a crucial aspect to be taken into account in their analysis and null models are needed for this end.
In this talk, I will explore a technique for generating null model surrogates of networks with given constraints where multiple or non-dichotomic connections among nodes are allowed. We develop a statistical mechanics framework based on entropy maximization considering hard constrained ensembles as well as soft constrained ones.
We will also discuss the effective generation of network instances belonging to each model. To exemplify the use of such null models for the analysis of real data in network form, we conclude by presenting a practical application based on our theoretical work to reliably extrapolate mobility records from a reduced sample.