UBC Department of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series
Distinguished Lecture Series Talk by Christos Papadimitriou, UC Berkeley
Looking at scientific problems at large from the point of view of computation often results in unexpected insights, and progress in important fronts. In this talk, I will discuss certain examples from the theory of equilibria in the social sciences, as well as from the evolution of genotypes in a sexual population, but I will mainly focus on approaches to a computational understanding of the Brain, arguably the ultimate scientific frontier of our time, and the one with the closest affinity to computation (in joint work with Santosh Vempala, Wolfgang Maass, and their groups). In particular, I will propose that the formation of memories in the medial temporal cortex, and the creation of associations between such memories, together with the closely related topic of language, may be an opportune subject for algorithmic modeling and analysis.
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