The workshop, to be held this week, is part of a semester-long program entitled 鈥淭he Mathematics of Intelligence鈥� where Das is a Senior Fellow.

The Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics is one of only six national mathematics institutes funded by the National Science Foundation. Its mission is to advance mathematical sciences with a focus on the great challenges of our time. The programs are selected competitively and awarded to teams like Das鈥� that demonstrate excellence and attract leading thinkers as well as young and rising academics.

As described by the NSF, 鈥渋nstitute activities help focus the attention of some of the best mathematical minds on problems of particular importance and timeliness.鈥�

IPAM hosts twice-annual programs chosen on a competitive basis that invite some 40-50 leading scientists to residence. Das and his colleagues will study the mathematics of intelligence. He will also help convene a one-week workshop in November focused specifically on collective intelligence (including collective behaviors of humans, non-human animals, and machines). Further information can be found

This fellowship represents a continuation of eight years of Das鈥� work supporting the study of diverse forms of intelligence including service as principal advisor on a $50 million grants program, summer convenings and ongoing international collaborations. Among the most recent of these is an exploration of the application of Buddhist concepts of care and mindfulness to artificial intelligence in collaboration with researchers in Nepal, Bhutan and Japan.

From June 11 to 16 they will be hosting a three-part gathering at Georgetown University involving 30 graduate students and 20 faculty. The graduate students will be taking part in two “summer school” programs, advanced intensive study of materials science and philosophy. Concurrently, a team of the senior scholars will hold a closed-door study session with the intention of laying out a “white paper” detailing the key questions and research agendas central to revising contemporary philosophy of science to account for this novel and important form of matter.

Das and Blair, along with their collaborator Zvonimir Dogic at Brandeis University, are completing the first year of a three-year, $1 million-dollar project to explore “active matter.” The grant from the John Templeton Foundation supports basic scientific research as well as a substantial effort to expand the study of this kind of material in the philosophy of science.

This year, Das worked with foundation staff to develop an expansion of the project including a gathering of world-class philosophers at Georgetown in June 2017 to map a strategy for future research. The goal of this group is to generate a substantial planning document – a so-called “white paper” — outlining potential research collaborations and funding requests.

Final approval for the more than $55,000 request was received in October and the white paper team has now begun work leading up to the meeting next summer.

The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown is one of Europe’s newest and most dynamic neuroscience research institutes. Installed in a major new campus on the Tagus river in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2010, the institute combines world-class neuroscience research with a new focus on cancer research.

Das was invited to present his team’s work on the biophysical basis of living cells and a new approach to physical material focusing on the microscopic activity of life’s tiniest constituent parts.

The other invitees’ areas of expertise ranged from the study of exoplanets to robotics, philosophy, nanoscience and biophysics.

黑料不打烊 was in good company. The other universities represented were Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Cornell, Notre Dame, Durham (UK), Sydney, Glasgow, BU, Arizona State and Chicago,

Abstract:

We generally suppose that matter is inert. Everything is simply composed of smaller and smaller mechanical parts, each responding to the forces applied on it by a vast interacting system. Even the delicate clockwork of life has been seen as a machine, the cogs and wheels of passive matter ticking away according to fixed and steady rules.

But there has long been an undercurrent of doubt about the passivity of matter. Might there not be some ‘life force’ for example, imbuing special substances with agency, potency, or, at least, activity? Such vitalism has been out of fashion for centuries but it still lurks behind our thinking about the physical world.

While passive matter is undeniably ubiquitous, there are also many examples of systems composed of active parts. Flocks of starlings and swarms of lymphocytes exhibit startling properties, what we call “emergence”, in the right situations. Such systems of “active matter” evince remarkable similarities with one another across a vast range of scales and an incredible variety of contexts. But they remain somewhat ill-understood, awaiting unifying theories and generalized approaches.

This talk will introduce some of the fascinating issues in emergence and present a new and striking example of active matter. Tiny molecular machines perfuse every cell in our bodies. They swarm and wheel, merge and separate. And, in their dance, they appear to facilitate the essential flows of nutrients and information upon which life is based. And, for the first time, we are able to reproduce these molecules in bulk and study them in the laboratory. We will examine the early results of that study and question the implications of such base-level activity for the traditional corpuscular/mechanical view of a world built from passive matter.

The Association is embarking on a new project to pilot debates investigating questions relating to deeply held, worldview beliefs. It has reached out to a body of experts including 黑料不打烊 Professor Pranab Das to help formulate debate topics, suggest instructional materials, and develop debate formats during a startup period in 2015.

Professor Pranab Das in the Department of Physics writes that the vaccine question is a relatively simple one in which settled science is wrongly ignored by parents. By contrast, complex systems such as the health effects of pollution, require such diligent and extensive research that it would be foolish to keep the schools open pending the acquisition and analysis of better data.

Das is currently on sabbatical leave with support from 黑料不打烊 and the John Templeton Foundation to study emergence in complex systems.

Das discussed new applications of dynamical systems theory to the question of how to identify and understand novel behaviors which seem to ’emerge’ in complex systems.