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Satellite Meeting ILACS - ECCS'10

Description

 

We are the International Latino America Committee of the Complex Systems Society (ILACS) and our main goal in this committee is to form a hub between the emergent researchers-laboratories of Latin America and the whole CS world. Specially we are looking for collaborations between Spanish and Latin-American research groups.

In the first stage, we made important progress: a mission to introduce and spread knowledge about the CSS with CS people in Latin America, such as meetings in Argentina, Chile and Colombia. These meetings were held in order to introduce the CSS, identify common areas of research, make teams of scientific collaboration and analyze cooperation agreements or projects in CS science and their applications. Thanks to this activity, we obtained two research projects, ECOS-Nord (2009-2011) and ECOS-Sud (2010-2012), to keep working in this direction.

The goals are to present the ILACS to the complex systems community, join researchers and plan the activities of the Committee for the next year. Also, we wish to consolidate the connection between our groups in order to debate the main objectives of the ILACS. The idea of organizing this kind of meeting is to speed up the dynamics of the committee, as well as to make it grow and develop.

Meeting Agenda

Lisbon, September 16, 2010. At 15:00 h.

This satellite meeting will be the annual meeting of the committee. It will take 3-3,30 hours, and will be organized in 3 parts:

  1. A short introduction about the ILACS (15 min.). Carla Taramasco, Andrés Véjar, Jonás Carmona.
  2. 3 talks on different CS topics (30 min. each one + 10 min. questions) with a coffee break (25min.).
  3. Workshop of the committee (45 min.). We will discuss past and future activities, and formulate the ILACS goals for coming years. In Spanish.

 

Schedule

 

15h-15h15Introduction ILACS
15h15-16h05Presentation Francisco Prieto
16h05-16h45Presentation Jonathan Platkiewicz
16h45-17h10Coffe-break
17h10-17h50Presentation Fernando Peruani
17h50-18h30Workshop of the committee

 

Presentation abstracts

 

Francisco Prieto (CETA-CIEMAT)

"Analysis and Modelling of distributed computing environments through a complex systems perspective"

Jonathan Platkiewicz (Département d'Etudes Cognitives, ENS, Paris)

"Action potential initiation: a complex dynamical process?"

Neurons are known to fire in an all-or-none fashion: a stereotypical action potential is generated and propagated when the neuron is sufficiently excited, otherwise it is not generated. The minimal stimulus intensity above which a spike is emitted is called the intensity threshold. Recent in vivo experiments have shown that this threshold is not a fixed quantity, but can be highly variable and adapt to the input dynamics. Moreover, recent experiments and computational studies have highlighted that the molecular machinery underlying action potential initiation is more subtle than previously thought. We have investigated in biophysical models of central neurons how the different excitability mechanisms contribute to the threshold variability. We have been able to give a quantitative prediction for these contributions. More specifically, we have looked at the interplay between a fundamental excitability mechanism, namely sodium channel inactivation, and threshold variability and adaptation. Interestingly, we have observed that patch-clamp data on sodium channel inactivation expressed in central neurons seem to confirm the hypothesis of a highly variable and adaptive threshold. 

 

Fernando Peruani (Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems)

"Transition to aggregation in bacterial colonies: myxobacteria mutants as self-propelled rods"

Myxobacteria, as many other bacteria, exhibit a transition from unicellularity to multicellularity when the level of nutrients is low. This fascinating process starts with the onset of clustering and collective motion. In contrast to Dictyostelium discoideum and other microorganisms, myxobacteria aggregate and coordinate their motion, in this early stage, without making use of diffusing chemical signals. We show through experiments with the mutant A+S-Frz- of M. xanthus, as well as through theoretical models, that is the active motion of the cells plus their rod-like shape what presumably allows cells to exhibit such collective effects. Provided the cell density is above a given threshold, a transition to aggregation occurs. The cluster size statistics from experimental data can be reproduced by a simple models for self-propelled rods.

 

Suspendida : Miguel Luengo. (Biomedical Image Technologies Lab of ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

 
"Follow that cell! In toto reconstruction of early zebrafish development"

The reconstruction and quantitative characterization of development of living species is a high interest field for bio-medicine: Which are the processes underlying animal embryogenesis that convert a single cell  into a multi-cellular organism formed by a rich diversity of cells organized in time and space? Recent advances in microscopy techniques allow obtaining in-vivo 3D image sequences of animal models at individual cell scale during embryogenesis. However, the huge amount of data collected by in-vivo observations has to be treated with robust and efficient image processing and quantitative analysis techniques. In this multidisciplinary context, a framework for reconstructing the cell lineage tree of zebrafish embryos for their first 10 cell division cycles will be presented. We have designed an original multi-harmonic label-free microscopy paradigm allowing to obtain fast images with micrometer spatial resolution and an image processing pipeline devoted to extract the position, shape and lineage tree for each cell of the embryo. The quantitative analysis of this data reveals the phenomenology of cell proliferation, where blastomeres continuously drift out of synchrony from the first cell division cycles.

 

Organization committee:

Carla Taramasco, Andrés Véjar, Jonás Carmona.
Email: ilacs@cssociety.org 
Web: http://ilacs.csregistry.org

Contributors to this page: taramasco , anonymous , Jonas and AndresVejar .
Page last modified on Thursday 16 of September, 2010 12:40:41 CEST by taramasco.