Idea Showcase #2: What Models Can (and Can't) Tell Us About Ourselves
Lisa Kimball - Moderator
Leon Glass - Modeling Patterns of Disease
Melanie Mitchell - Cognitive Modeling
Olaf Sporns - Embodied Cognition and Robotics
Leon Glass
Modeling patterns of disease
Leon Glass and Michael Mackey at McGill University in Montreal were among the first to explore the possibility that many medical problems may be what they call "dynamical diseases", produced by changes in physiological factors that cause normally rhythmic processes to show erratic or chaotic fluctuations. For instance, in some blood diseases the numbers of blood cells show large oscillations that are not normally present. Glass and Mackey showed that simple, but realistic, mathematical models for controlling blood cell production display the same periodic and chaotic oscillations as seen clinically when some parameter is varied. Such changes in the parameters of the model have a physiological interpretation. Clifford Gurney of the University of Chicago has performed experiments, based on Mackey and Glass's models, which produce oscillations in numbers of blood cells in mice.
Melanie Mitchell
Cognitive Modeling
Melanie Mitchell's dissertation work with Douglas Hofstadter was on cognitive modeling of high-level perception and analogy-making. She has held faculty or research positions at the
University of Michigan, the Santa Fe Institute (as Director of the
Institute's Adaptive Computation Program), the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, and the School of Science and Engineering at the
Oregon Health & Science University. She is currently Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Mitchell is the author of Analogy-Making as Perception (MIT Press, 1993) and An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms (MIT Press, 1996). She is a co-editor of Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms (Addison Wesley, 1996) and Perspectives on
Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (Oxford University Press,2005).
Olaf Sporns
Embodied Cognition and Robotics
Olaf Sporns at Indiana University in Bloomington is interested in using
computational modeling techniques to understand how biological nervous
systems function, learn and adapt to their environments. Sporns has
developed a series of brain models that can be embedded in behaving
robots, allowing researchers to study these autonomous systems as if
they were real organisms. These studies have provided insights into how
behavior depends on reward, memory, and information from multiple
senses. It also offers a promising new avenue towards the design of a
new generation of intelligent machines. To understand the operation of
the robot and its brain, Sporns has also designed mathematical tools
that allow us to quantify information as it is processed and integrated
within the complex networks of the brain. It turns out that the precise
wiring of the brain matters a great deal for its capacity to efficiently
process information.
Moderator: Lisa Kimball, founder, Group Jazz
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