Tutorials
What’s interesting in Information Processing in Cellular Automata?
| Organiser: Q. Tyrell Davis | Room: 3A07 |
What does a universe need to be interesting? One answer might be that a universe is more likely to be interesting if it supports the emergence of objects that can ask the question (though our perspective is necessarily biased in that regard). Cellular automata have long been an essential class of systems for studying self-organisation, with the tantalising prospect of intrinsic evolution always seemingly just around the corner. CA offer simplicity as self-contained microcosmos for studying the essence of emergence and questioning what makes for interesting dynamics. The continued development of tools based on information theory offer an attractive lens for studying CA, particularly the primitives of storage, transfer, and modification of information. These seem to be deeply correlated to life-like computational processes at the edge of chaos, and we’ll survey the confluence of these ideas in this tutorial.
Preparation/materials:
A repository accompanying the tutorial can be found at https://gitlab.com/asteraceous/iflowinca/-/blob/master/README.md
Neuromorphic Sensing & Computing: Event-Based Vision and Mixed-Signal Neuromorphic Systems
| Organiser: Federico Corradi | Room: 4A05 |
This tutorial addressed the gap between biological intelligence and electronic hardware by exploring the principles of neuromorphic engineering. The session introduces the fundamentals of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), event-driven sensing, and mixed-signal processing. Through live demonstrations of silicon retinas and neuromorphic processors, participants will observe how asynchronous, bio-inspired sensing and computing capture the principles of massively parallel spike-based sensing and computing. We will discuss how noise, chaos, and self-organization, often suppressed in digital logic, could become an invaluable source in bio-inspired computing systems.
Preparation/materials:
I will demonstrate the event-based camera and the neuromorphic processor using my own hardware setup. While I do not expect participants to download software to follow the session, those interested in hands-on experimentation during the workshop/project sessions are welcome to do so. Participants wishing to use the hardware can install the following beforehand and or explore it. Disclaimer: the software is a research software and not a product, bugs are expected. Several options are possible, so I suggest to wait for the tutorial. For curious minds here the options:
- dv-gui software - officially supported by the vendor of the DVS camera (Inivation)
- dynapse software supported by the vendor (Inivation)
- openFrameworks (not supported by vendor, but used during my tutorial)
- openFrameworks custom addons:
Life as an out-of-equilibrium process. Introduction to Chemical Reaction Networks and out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics.
| Organiser: Davide Cois | Room: 2A05 |
In this tutorial we use chemical reaction networks (CRNs) to represent energy-driven biochemical dynamics as a model of “life-like” behaviour. The session combines a 30-minute theoretical introduction to CRNs with 30 minutes of hands-on exercises applying the theory in an interactive Python notebook. We’ll cover the basics or CRNs, equilibrium properties, and how energy dissipation can drive systems out of equilibrium. The focus is on building physical intuition for analysing persistent currents and continuous energy dissipation, a fundamental signature of living systems. We close with biologically inspired examples illustrating how energy input can enable capabilities beyond equilibrium networks, such as stronger responses and more robust functional behaviour.
Preparation/materials:
During the interactive part, attendees need to be able to run a Jupyter notebook requiring basic libraries such as numpy, matplotlib, scipy. The notebook has to be downloaded from the Gitlab repo: https://gitlab.com/alice-workshop/alice-crn-tutorial
From paper to headline: how science goes public
| Organiser: Elise Cutts | Room: 5A09 |
Have you ever wondered how a scientific paper ends up becoming a science news story? What exactly happens when a journalist calls you up about your work? And how can you present your research in ways that will grab the attention of journalists and interested laypeople alike? In this tutorial, you’ll see how scientific studies make science news and learn tricks for sparking public interest in your work. The workshop is led by Elise Cutts, a freelance science journalist whose writing on complexity, biophysics, astrobiology, and more appears in magazines like Quanta, Scientific American, New Scientist, Science, and Science News.
