Timescales characterize how fast the observables change in time. In neuro science, they can be estimated from the measured activity and can be used, for example, as a signature of the memory trace in the activations. Inferring the
timescales seems to be an easy task; however, I will show you how the timescales are subject to a statistical bias that is impossible to remove by a simple...
In a rapidly changing world, facing an increasing number of socioeconomic, health and environmental crises, physics of data and complex systems can help us to assess and quantify
vulnerabilities, and to monitor and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the main areas of applications where physics of data and
complex systems has shown its...
In physics the data that is acquired in experiments are highly-controlled and often taken with specific goals in mind. However, the notion of a “Physics of Data” is about using mathematical tools developed in physics to understand data acquired in more open-ended and uncontrolled environments. As the data acquisition process becomes more opaque and distant from any particular purpose, we have...
Many interesting physical processes occur on timescales that are very long compared to the shortest significant timescale involved. For example, timescales for folding the smallest of proteins are in the range of microseconds to milliseconds, while small-amplitude motions of amino acid side chains occur within 1 fs.
This large difference of timescales can present serious computational...
One of the fundamental open problems in knot theory is their classification, which aims to discriminate whether two given closed curves are topologically equivalent or not. The
problem might be tackled with knot invariants, such as the Alexander polynomial, quantities that are the same for equivalent knots. Nevertheless, algorithms implementing
knot recognition through invariants might take...
The visual cortex is the sensory area of the brain responsible for the information processing that underlies our visual perceptions. The first part of the cortex that receives input from visual stimuli is called primary visual cortex, or V1. It is the most studied area of the visual cortex, and probably the most studied sensory area of the brain in general.
Since the Nobel prize works of...
I will present a data-driven approach to identify from physical proximity data features of human contact patterns that determine crucial properties of epidemic outbreaks. From the physical proximity data, we construct for each individual
a point-process-like representation of their contacts, from which we estimate the distribution of potential secondary infections for different disease...
The promise of quantum computing is to provide new methods to unveil the physics of molecules and materials that has been inaccessible to the conventional numerical modeling. Over the past few years, quantum annealers have grown in complexity to the point that the computation of molecular energies has
become a feasible application. Whilst typical approaches use quantum annealers to extract...
Natural language processing (NLP) is the ability of a computer to understand human languages. In both the academic and the industrial world, NLP has been widely used for different purposes such as Sentiment Analysis, Semantic
Text Similarity (STS), Text Translation, and Question Answering (QA), to cite a few.
With the advent of the Transformer model architectures like BERT, the performances...
In 2015, the LIGO/VIRGO interferometers detected the first gravitational wave (GW) signal coming from the merger of two black holes. Since then, about 90 merging binary compact
objects (BCOs), namely binary neutron stars and black holes, have been detected through GW signals. This wealth of new data provides us with crucial insight on the populations
of BCOs. For this reason, numerical tools...
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is one of our most powerful tools to probe the fundamental particles of nature and their interactions. By colliding protons at extremely high energies (13 TeV centre of mass), the LHC can probe conditions of the early universe just after the Big Bang. Particle detectors, such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment are designed to reconstruct the...
Experimental observations and convincing conceptual arguments indicate that the present understanding of fundamental physics is not complete, motivating the search for physics beyond the Standard Model at collider experiments. The most common searching strategy is to test the data for the presence of one candidate new theory at a time and therefore optimise the data analysis to be sensitive to...
