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Complex Systems Summer School 2013 |
I am a Complex Systems PhD student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. I was born in Galicia, in the north west of Spain near a place the Romans used to call "Finis Terrae", the end of the earth. I studied there for many years until I began a wander: Heidelberg and Darmstadt (Germany), Granada (south Spain), Berlin (Germany again), and now Barcelona. In the meanwhile I studied Physics and Computational Neuroscience.
I am interested in very different topics from physics, biology, sociology... and much more; but currently I focus my research a bit on synthetic computation, on different aspects of languages (evolution, dynamics...), and also something about optimization algorithms. I am always eager to tell more about what I do!
I extend a little bit my topics bellow:
- Language dynamics: For my degree thesis I studied the competition between languages--precisely between my two mother tongues--in Galicia when you introduce bilingualism in a previously existing model. We published [1] or [2] papers on the topic. I come back to this topic from time to time and remain interested in everything related to languages:
- How do they emerge? How do they interact? How do uses, grammar, vocabulary change over time?
- Any connection to ecology?
- What is language? What is its connection to intelligence?
- Computational neuroscience:
- I made my M.Sc. on this topic. My master thesis was about neural cryptography, a relatively limited area with still some interesting things to explore. Neural cryptography relies on artificial neural network synchronization, which is non-trivial and difficult to achieve. I see more space for investigation there!
- A little bit of research on noise in the brain: There is this very interesting phenomenon called Stochastic Amplification that arises in collective, stochastic systems. This can surely not be ruled out, so my guess is that nature exploits it to compute as it pleases her. What do you think?
- One of the coolest things I ever made was this project on image reconstruction using EEG signals. Quite impressive and close to mind-reading, but the theory underneath is so plain and simple that the thing had to work, as it did! Unluckily, research related to this would be quite big for a summer project... But our lives just begin now, don't they?