LECTURERS ABSTRACTS  the times and dates to be discussed.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Mario Mladinov (Slovenia)

ABSTRACT: Technological (r)evolution created countless new and uncharted ways for people to communicate with each others. However, with better connectivity and more possible channels of communication, many dark areas were also created from within which people with right knowledge can endanger our safety (both physical, psychological and economic) and our privacy. This lecture will talk about what it means to be secure and how not to be a victim in this digital age..

-"GRAZING INCIDENCE OPTICS: HOW TO MESURE MIRRORS WITH A NANOMETER ACCURACY? 
Giovanni Sostero (Italia),

ABSTRACT:  -"The growing interest on X-UV applications (like those related with Sinchrotron Radiation Storage Rings and Free Electron Lasers) has prompted an important development in the field of optics. Currently the standard requirements for such items are very severe, and their production and testing is a real challenge played on the nanometric scale"-.

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF METEOR SCIENCE: strange sounds, puzzling radiation and unexplained micro-physics of meteors
Dejan Vinkovic, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (USA)

ABSTRACT:  "How do meteors produce sounds that travel faster than the speed of sound? How do meteors glow at amazingly high altitudes of almost 200km? What exactly is happening around the meteor body when it burns out? Are they capable of delivering organic molecules from space? One would think that meteors, also known as shooting stars, are a well studied and completely understood phenomenon. But meteors display such a large range of physical conditions as they fly through the atmosphere that we are just beginning to unravel their mysteries."

REPRESENTATION OF SPACE IN THE BRAIN
Marina Brozovic, California Institute of Technology (USA)

ABSTRACT: Located at the cross-roads of the sensory and motor pathways, the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) gives rise to many higher cognitive functions such as spatial awareness, attention, motion perception, and intentions. Andersen Lab at Caltech is studying a neural basis of cognition utilizing neurophysiological, psychophysical, anatomical, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and theoretical techniques. Understanding of the parietal cortex can one day result in neuronal implants which would allow paralyzed patients to control  prosthetic devices purely on the visual feedback system in the brain. My research involves understanding how the parietal cortex processes visual and auditory signals of objects, and converts this information to a motoric action such as reach. This requires neurons in the parietal cortex to preform coordinate transformation from the sensory reference frame to the motor reference frame. For example, a position of a coffee cup is encoded in the eye reference frame, and in order to reach for that cup, we have to "know" its position with respect to our hand. Experiments have shown that the activity of a neuron that does the "calculation" is modulated by eye, head and hand position. The mathematics of the neurons in the parietal cortex is studied through neural networks and the properties that arise in the network through its training.