Prof.
Elena Dubrova
(KTH)
5/16/08, 10:00 AM
Random Boolean Networks (RBNs) were introduced by Kaufmann
in 1969 in the context of gene expression and fitness
landscapes. They were applied to the problems of cell
differentiation, immune response, evolution, and neural
networks. They have also attracted the interest of
physicists due to their analogy with the disordered systems
studied in statistical mechanics, such as the mean...
Prof.
Joachim Krug
(University of Cologne)
5/16/08, 10:20 AM
The evolutionary search of a finite population in a rugged
fitness or energy landscape with many local optima is a
paradigmatic problem that connects evolutionary biology to
the statistical physics of disordered systems and computer
science. In this brief presentation I summarize the results
of two recent studies which addressed different aspects of
this problem. A detailed numerical...
Prof.
Haijun Zhou
(Chinese Academy of Sciences)
5/16/08, 11:00 AM
The mutual influence of structure and dynamical processes in
a complex networked system is an active yet challenging
research topic. In the present report we approach this
problem by studying a simple model system, namely the local
majority-rule (LMR) dynamics on an evolving network. We
first show analytically and by computer simulation that the
structure of the network can have a...
Prof.
Scott Kirkpatrick
(School of Engineering and CS, HUJI)
5/16/08, 1:00 PM
Statistical mechanics turned a corner with Mezard and
Zecchina's realization that its methods could be applied to
solve individual combinatorial problems as well as to
characterize the expected outcome of classes of problems.
But the methods, such as message passing or simulated
annealing, that stay closest to the physical analogies can
be extremely time-consuming and may not scale to...
Dr
Luis Lafuente
(MIT CBA)
5/16/08, 2:00 PM
Linear Programming can solve some unlikely problems, like
decoding parity check codes, sorting, and other things. A
lovely old theorem by Birkhoff and von Neumann distinguishes
the cases in which the solution is guaranteed to lie on the
integers 0 and 1. Unfortunately, this result fails to apply
to NP-Complete problems -- it guarantees to solve the 8
rooks problem, but not the 8...
Prof.
Ilkka Niemelä
(TKK)
5/16/08, 3:00 PM
Tools for solving the propositional satisfiability (SAT)
problem have advanced dramatically during the last ten years
and are now standardly used in industrial applications such
as hardware design verification and automatic test pattern
generation. SAT solvers are also becoming widely used
search engines in areas with challenging computation
problems such as automated planning,...
Prof.
John Hertz
(NORDITA)
5/16/08, 4:00 PM
We can learn something about how large neuronal networks
function from models of the spike pattern distributions
constructed from data. In our work, we do this for data
generated from simulated models of local cortical networks,
using the approach introduced by Schneidman et al, modeling
this distribution by an Ising model: P[S] =
Z^{-1}exp(½Σ_{ij}J_{ij}S_iS_j+Σ_i h_i S_i). To estimate...
Prof.
Heiko Rieger
(Universität des Saarlandes)
5/16/08, 4:20 PM
Targeted transport of vesicles, organelles and other types
of cargo is necessary for living cells to maintain their
complex internal structure. Molecular motors attached to
this cargo power the long-range traffic of cargo along
microtubules in a bidirectional way. The attachment of two
kinds of motors, one pulling towards the cell periphery and
one towards the cell center, lead to a...
Prof.
Neil Gershenfeld
(MIT CBA)
5/16/08, 5:00 PM
Computer Science has served to isolate programs (and
programmers) from knowledge of the underlying physical
mechanisms used for computation. However, in the limit in
which the number of computational and physical degrees of
freedom become equivalent it's no longer possible to
maintain this fiction. I will explore the benefits of
exposing rather than hiding the boundary between bits...
