The Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (RIDC NeuroMat) will launch in August the podcast "A Matemática do Cérebro" --in Portuguese, Mathematics of the Brain. This resource will be available on the most important podcast technologies and also hosted on its own website. The production of the podcast is led by NeuroMat director Antonio Galves and the newest member of the RIDC, Eduardo Vicente, from the University of São Paulo School of Communications and Arts.
A recent NeuroMat paper has addressed the conjecture that the brain identifies structures from sequences of stimuli. It means that in order to make predictions the brain analyzes structured sequences of stimuli and retrieves from them statistical regularities. This classical conjecture is often called "Statistician Brain Conjecture" and is associated to studies on how one learns. The NeuroMat research team has introduced a new class of stochastic processes --sequences of random objects driven by chains with memory of variable length-- to address this conjecture.
The NeuroMat dissemination team has launched a project to contribute actively on social media communities with patients, caregivers and health professionals related to traumatic brachial plexus injuries. This project is developed under the scope of NeuroMat's initiative "Action for Brachial Plexus Injury" - ABRAÇO and is funded by a scientific journalism fellowship by FAPESP. The grantee is Matheus Cornely Sayão; supervisors are Cláudia Domingues Vargas and Fernando J. Paixão, respectively coordinator of ABRAÇO and NeuroMat dissemination coordinator.
The RIDC NeuroMat research team has put forward a rigorous mathematical model for short-term plasticity. This type of plasticity has been the object of studies since at least the mid 90s, and a recent paper by Antonio Galves, Eva Löcherbach, Christophe Pouzat and Errico Presutti has now proposed a simple probabilistic model describing this phenomenon within a large network of neurons.
The project that created the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (RIDC NeuroMat) in 2013 has been renewed by the São Paulo Research Foundation for a six-year term, and in this context we launch a series to connect our past and current trajectory. This series has been called "First 5, Next 6", a direct reference to content produced by our team within the center renewal process, especially a presentation to FAPESP's International Assessment Committee in 2017. The first part of this text is informed by NeuroMat's Statement of Impact, again a document prepared in the renewal process.
