Daan van den Berg

Nationality

Dutch

Function

Technician

Function Description

I come from a background of computational psychology, a branch-off from artificial intelligence which is mainly concerned with creating brain-like models which are supposed to explain something about the information-processing properties of the human brain. Completely in harmony with this line are my current investigations on auto-organizing chaotic networks. The units of the network are chaotic, which basically means they produce a series of values without any apparent structure. If you establish a connection between these units, they tend to synchronise. Doing this for a large pool of units with a sparse connection density a remarkable phenomenon happens: it auto-evolves to a small world network. A small world network has a high clustering coefficient and short characteristic path length, basically meaning that although the network is very big and although the number of connections is fairly low, itKf4; still very fast and efficient in the distribution of information. In fact, it is shown that some natural brains have a small world structure and suggested more than often the human brain has a high degree of small-worldedness. IMe5; currently investigating the scaling properties of the auto-evolving networks. It might well be that these also resemble the human brain. Hence, the model is interesting at the very least. Besides the simulation projects my position has a technical side to it as well. I build the simulators I use and am currently studying COM-technology to make the simulators generally available. Note that current executables are downloadable from the PDL-site under Odf;ownload applications.

Projects

Kaite - A coupled logistic map bifurcation diagram drawing application: Daan van den Berg
Picard - A chaotic small world network simulator: Daan van den Berg

Staff

Daan van den Berg

Nationality

Function

Function Description

Projects

Publications