Actions

From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki

Revision as of 17:23, 4 June 2013 by Seoane (talk | contribs)
Complex Systems Summer School 2013

{border}

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 one or two papers on the topic. I come back to this 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 importance regarding intelligence?
  • This extends to interest in cultures: how do they arise? what about religions or social conventions? and history (is it a lie?)?


Computational neuroscience:

I made my M.Sc. on Computationla Neuroscience, if such a field exists. During that time I explored very interesting problems:

  • My master thesis was about neural cryptography, a relatively limited area with still some interesting things to explore. Neural cryptography relies on the synchronization of artificial neural network, 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 (different from Stochastic Resonance) that arises in collective, stochastic systems. This noisy phenomenon, that might seem undesirable, can probably not be suppressed; 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 it 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?
  • There is also that small project that I loved. The idea was to apply renormalization and other ideas from statistical mechanics to solve the game of Go. The project was bigger than the time we had for it, so it remained unfinished; but it's never late to come back. This is not so related to neuroscience, but it was done within a lecture on Machine Learning.

I haven't been doing anything about neuroscience in the last months. It is a very challenging field and requires theories explaining loads of existing data... almost impossible. The most complicated questions remain open:

  • What is intelligence? Are we beyond universal Turing machines?
  • What about collective intelligence?
  • Structure of neural networks is each time clearer but: what is its actual function? Can functionality remain if we change the topology of the brain?


The Complex Systems Lab:

Almost two years ago I began working at the Complex Systems Lab (CSL) of the Pompeu Fabra university in Barcelona, led by Prof. Ricard Solé, an external faculty member of the SFI. Accordingly, my research areas exploded exponentially straight away:

  • Theoretical biology: I use different models to research issues on theoretical ecology like cell differentiation, gene regulatory networks, the role of noise in cell dynamics, information processing in cells, with cells... One hot topic here--of which I participate providing theoretical backup--is distributed computation in cellular consortia.
Retrieved from ""