The tools we've developed in the Information Age thus far have enabled us to be more efficient and cost-effective with atoms. Going forward, we'll need to do better if we hope to replace factories with printers, fossil fuels with harvested energy, and farmed food with sustainable, microcultivated crops. We'll create hardware that is as configurable as software, rocket boosters than can orbit ten times more weight per joule, energy storage systems big and long-lasting enough to support wind farms and other sustainable forms of energy, methods for producing entirely new materials, and ways to program life itself. This conference is all about harnessing bits to upgrade our physical world. Atoms do matter.
Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria)
IST Austria was founded by the Austrian government and is governed by an independent Board of Trustees. The Institute adds a powerful component to the research and higher education activities of Austria by attracting top scientists from the best European and U.S. laboratories. IST Austria fosters interdisciplinary research activities at the interface of computer science, neuroscience, and molecular and cellular biology, and encourages collaborations in these key research fields.
The Institute is dedicated to basic research in the natural and mathematical sciences. IST Austria employs professors on a tenure-track system, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students at its international graduate school. While dedicated to the principle of curiosity-driven research, the Institute owns the rights to all scientific discoveries and is committed to promote their use.
Our visit will include stops at:
- Csicsvari Group – Systems Neuroscience
Jozsef Csicsvari focuses on the hippocampus, a brain area of central importance for memory formation, and aims to understand how learning leads to this memory formation. - Lampert Group – Computer Vision and Machine Learning
Christoph Lampert studies and develops statistical machine learning algorithms for computer vision applications, in particular for the task of natural image understanding. - Tkačik Group – Biophysics and Neuroscience
Gašper Tkačik studies information processing in living systems from the perspective of a is a theoretical physicist.