Pavia, September 14 - 17, 1998

Index Chairmen Program committee Scientific secretary Aims of the workshop Topics Program Workshop site Workshop modalities		THE DYNAMICS OF BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION Luciano da Fontoura Costa Cybernetic Vision Research Group DFI-IFSC, University of Sao Paulo, USP Caixa Postal 369, Sao Carlos, SP, 13560-970 Brazil e-mail: luciano@ultra3000.ifsc.sc.usp.br http: //www.ifqsc.sc.usp.br/visao/group/members/luciano/luciano.htm fax: +55 162 71 3616 The important issue of biological evolution, with emphasis on neural information processing, is approached from a number of distinct perspectives including: natural selection, multi-scale organization, regularization theory (environmental constraints), physical constraints (especially internal and external morphology of the different species), neural computation, information theory, chaos, fractals, and power laws. The concepts and theories reviewed and advanced in the presentation are illustrated in terms of some real examples, including the particularly relevant case of development of neural structures. Since neurons are no more than highly specialized cells, efforts will be focused on drawing parallels between processes underlying the emmergence of cooperative assemblies of general cells and the development of the neural system. Special attention will be placed on how the morphology of such cells can be characterized in terms of local and global shape features to be considered as an important aspect underlying the evolutionary process. The emmergence of attentional processes and creativity in neural structures will also be included in the context of the presentation.
URL: http://vision.unipv.it/hmp98 e-mail: hmp@ipvvis.unipv.it