News – Page 5 – Romanian Institute of Science and Technology

Best PhD thesis of the year in computational game theory

RIST awarded the following young scientists for the best PhD thesis project of the year in computational game theory: Noémi Gaskó, Tudor Dan Mihoc, and Scott Duke Kominers.

Finding attractors of continuous-time systems by parameter switching

RIST’s Marius F. Danca has found that if the control parameter p, of a continuous-time nonlinear system belonging to a large class of systems, is switched within a set of chosen values in a deterministic or even random manner, while the underlying model is numerically integrated, the obtained attractor is a numerical approximation of one of the existing attractors of the considered system.

1st International Conference on Coping with Complexity

RIST co-organizes this conference which welcomes scientists and researchers over the vast field of complexity to exchange ideas in Cluj-Napoca, on October 19-20, 2011.

The institute has received a grant from John Templeton Foundation

The USA foundation awarded a grant to the group led by prof. Dumitru Dumitrescu for a project entitled “Towards a conceptual integration of artificial intelligence, game theory and decision theory”.

The brain’s timescale correlates to the timescale of visual stimuli

Our scientists have found that the internal timescale of the brain, i.e., the time window needed by neurons to encode a given aspect of the visual stimulus, is tightly correlated to the external timescale of the visual stimulus, i.e., the speed with which the visual image on the retina changes.

The Coneural – Max Planck Partner Group has been renewed

The partnership between the institute’s Center for Cognitive and Neural Studies (Coneural) and the prestigious Max Plank Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, has been extended for another 2 years (2011-2013), after an evaluation of the work performed in the previous 3 years. Peter Gruss, the President of the Max Planck Society (Germany), stated in the renewal letter: “It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity to inform you of the very successful outcome of the mid-term review of your Partner Group. The review report points out the impressive scientific output of the Partner Group during the first three years since its inception. I congratulate you upon this success”.

Visualizing how the brain encodes information

The institute’s scientists have developed a special visualization technique for how multiple neurons fire spikes together to encode information, by representing the identity of firing patterns of multiple neurons with color sequences.