January 10, 2010

Dynamics Days Wednesday, Thursday overview

Sorry for the late post, but I haven't been able to get around to this posting until today. The half for Dynamics Days was almost as good as the first half. The first talk of Wednesday was by Steve Strogatz, who introduced us to a phenomenon called chimera spiral waves. The interesting thing about these waves is that they are spiral-like with discrete color-bands in the outer part of the spiral, but are disordered and pixellated in the inner part of the spiral. There is an arXIv paper on the topic if you are interested in learning more.

Other topics covered were computational neuroscience, chaos in boolean networks, and complex networks. There was a presentation on so-called "neural avalanches" , where discharges of electrical activity in the brain exhibit power-law behavior in time. Some of the complex networks speakers focused on an idea called "community structure", where the goal is to find the structure within and between groups in a network. A related topic of interest was the finding the "giant component" in networks first proposed by Erdos and Renyi.

Overall, excellent conference. The next Dyanmics Days (2011) is supposed to be at Duke University and should be quite interesting.

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