Lecture 1: Monday, 21 April 2025, 16:30 to 17:30
Lecture 2: Tuesday, 21 April 2025, TBA
Lecture 3: Wednesday, 22 April 2025, TBA
Title: Dynamical Systems and artificial intelligence applied to data modelling in biological problems.
Abstract: Nonlinear dynamics aims to elucidate the basic mechanisms necessary to reflect the temporal behavior of a natural system. The data analysis and modeling techniques proposed by artificial intelligence (deep networks, computational reservoirs, recurrent networks, as examples), on the other hand, ostensibly resign the mechanistic vision for a data-oriented modeling paradigm. In these lectures, these apparently antagonistic approaches will be analyzed in parallel, using as examples my work on the physics of birdsong production and vocal learning.
About the speaker: Gabriel Mindlin was born on September 2, 1963. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Physics from UNLP and a PhD in Physics from Drexel University (Philadelphia, 1992). He was a professor at the University of Navarra (Spain, 1994) and an associate researcher at the University of California (2002-2004). Currently, he is a Full Professor in the Department of Physics at FCEN-UBA and a Senior Researcher at CONICET.
He has authored more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals in his field and four books. His work includes publications in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review Letters, among other high-impact journals. He has supervised 20 completed PhD theses (with three more in progress).
He is the founder of the Laboratory of Dynamical Systems, one of the most innovative and disruptive research labs in the Latin American scientific system. Over the years, physicists, neuroscientists, biologists, medical doctors, and engineers have collaborated in this lab to study the physics and neuroscience of vocal learning and birdsong production.
His training is in nonlinear dynamics, a mathematical framework well-suited for studying the behavior of complex systems. From this perspective, he began investigating problems in behavioral neuroscience, focusing on the study of birdsong. Birdsong serves as an ideal model for understanding how the nervous system, biophysics, and environment interact during a learning process. Currently, his research focuses on the application of artificial intelligence techniques to biodiversity studies, as well as the relationship between nonlinear dynamics and neural networks, which are at the core of artificial intelligence.
He has received numerous national and international awards, including the Estímulo Award from the Bunge y Born Foundation, the Arthur Winfree Award from ICTP (Trieste), the Konex award and has been named a Fellow of the AAAS. He is also a member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences.
These lectures are part of the discussion meeting on Neuroscience, Data Science and Dynamics.