Ten minutes for your mind@2:50 every day at 2:50 pm in multiple time zones:Europa@2:50, EET, Athens, Helsinki (UTC+2) (7:50 am EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298032734Atlantica@2:50, EST, New York, Toronto (UTC-4) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85349851047Pacifica@2:50, PST, Los Angeles, Vancouver (UTC=7) (5:50 pm EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85743543699Almost everything works better again if you unplug it for a bit, including your mind. Stop by and unplug. Get the benefits of mindfulness without the fuss.@2:50 meets at the same time every single day for ten minutes of quiet together.No pre-requisite, no registration needed.Visit the website to view all @2:50 time zones each day.at250.org or at250.mit.edu

Time: 3:30 PMLocation: Babson Park, MA

For researchers interested in commercializing their new technology:● Learn what I-Corps is all about and what to expect in the program ● Explore the benefits of participating in our I-Corps short course ● What will the next steps be toward a potential $2MM in non-dilutive funding supportThere will be an opportunity for Q&A at the end of the session.

Speaker: Xin Jin (Boston College)Title: Multiplicative universal centralizer: Bruhat stratification, cluster structure and applicationsAbstract: The universal centralizer of a complex reductive group plays an important role in geometric representation theory. Aside from the standard group scheme structure, it possesses a natural Bruhat decomposition (and consequently a ''parabolic induction" structure) that makes the geometry quite explicit, and has many applications.The multiplicative version of the universal centralizer possesses a similar feature but has much richer (and more complicated) algebraic geometric structures. I will talk about recent results on several geometric features of the multiplicative universal centralizer. These include (a complete description of) a natural Bruhat stratification and the cluster structure on it. I will also talk about several applications. This is based on joint work with Ben Webster.

Talk Title: A cellular basis for mapping behavioural structureAbstract: To flexibly adapt to new situations, our brains must understand the regularities in the world, as well as those in our own patterns of behaviour. A wealth of findings is beginning to reveal the algorithms that we use to map the outside world. However, the biological algorithms that map the complex structured behaviours that we compose to reach our goals remain unknown. Here we reveal a neuronal implementation of an algorithm for mapping abstract behavioural structure and transferring it to new scenarios. We trained mice on many tasks that shared a common structure (organizing a sequence of goals) but differed in the specific goal locations. The mice discovered the underlying task structure, enabling zero-shot inferences on the first trial of new tasks. The activity of most neurons in the medial frontal cortex tiled progress to goal, akin to how place cells map physical space. These ‘goal-progress cells’ generalized, stretching and compressing their tiling to accommodate different goal distances. By contrast, progress along the overall sequence of goals was not encoded explicitly. Instead, a subset of goal-progress cells was further tuned such that individual neurons fired with a fixed task lag from a particular behavioural step. Together, these cells acted as task-structured memory buffers, implementing an algorithm that instantaneously encoded the entire sequence of future behavioural steps, and whose dynamics automatically computed the appropriate action at each step. These dynamics mirrored the abstract task structure both on-task and during offline sleep. Our findings suggest that schemata of complex behavioural structures can be generated by sculpting progress-to-goal tuning into task-structured buffers of individual behavioural steps.Bio: Tim Behrens is a neuroscientist at Oxford and UCLWebinar Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89002014229?pwd=bzZuZGh6cVhOSjJ6TlNZVHgrRnNaQT09Followed by a reception with food and drink in 3rd floor atrium