Related papers: Issues in data expansion in understanding critical…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
Hallmarks of criticality, such as power-laws and scale invariance, have been empirically found in cortical networks and it has been conjectured that operating at criticality entails functional advantages, such as optimal computational…
Recent experimental results based on multi-electrode and imaging techniques have reinvigorated the idea that large neural networks operate near a critical point, between order and disorder. However, evidence for criticality has relied on…
In complex systems, external parameters often determine the phase in which the system operates, i.e., its macroscopic behavior. For nearly a century, statistical physics has extensively studied systems' transitions across phases,…
Motivated by the idea that criticality and universality of phase transitions might play a crucial role in achieving and sustaining learning and intelligent behaviour in biological and artificial networks, we analyse a theoretical and a…
Many studies have found evidence that the brain operates at a critical point, a processus known as self-organized criticality. A recent paper found remarkable scalings suggestive of criticality in systems as different as neural cultures,…
Spreading processes on networks are ubiquitous in both human-made and natural systems. Understanding their behavior is of broad interest; from the control of epidemics to understanding brain dynamics. While in some cases there exists a…
The critical state is assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks, because criticality maximizes a number of abstract computational properties. We challenge this assumption by evaluating the performance of a…
Criticality has been proposed as a key principle underlying complex behavior in biological and artificial systems; however, how criticality translates from individual dynamics to collective behavior remains unclear. We study this question…
The observation of apparent power-laws in neuronal systems has led to the suggestion that the brain is at, or close to, a critical state and may be a self-organised critical system. Within the framework of self-organised criticality a…
Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a…
Dynamical criticality has been shown to enhance information processing in dynamical systems, and there is evidence for self-organized criticality in neural networks. A plausible mechanism for such self-organization is activity dependent…
There are indications that for optimizing neural computation, neural networks - including the brain - operate at criticality. Previous approaches have, however, used diverse fingerprints of criticality, leaving open the question whether…
In this paper we study a simple model of a purely excitatory neural network that, by construction, operates at a critical point. This model allows us to consider various markers of criticality and illustrate how they should perform in a…
In this work, we report the preliminary analysis of the electrophysiological behavior of in vitro neuronal networks to identify when the networks are in a critical state based on the size distribution of network-wide avalanches of activity.…
Novel computing hardwares are necessary to keep up with today's increasing demand for data storage and processing power. In this research project, we turn to the brain for inspiration to develop novel computing substrates that are…
On the phase diagram of a system undergoing a continuous phase transition of the second order, three lines, hyper-surfaces, convergent into the critical point feature prominently: the ordered and disordered phases in the thermodynamic…