Fall Semester 2007

Summer is now winding down at Krasnow, and the usual “early-onset” George Mason University semester is only a few weeks away. With the end of summer, and the promise of cooler and less humid weather in the Washington DC area, the faculty and students begin to return from their summer travels and the lights in the Institute will begin to burn late late into the night again as experiments are run, brains are scanned and manuscripts are prepared for publication.

This new academic year marks the formal beginning of the Institute’s George Mason role as a full academic unit. This in addition to continuing as an institute for advanced study. It will be interesting and challenging to see how both of those missions blend. Most important will be the need to keep focusing on advanced science–science the challenges the paradigm.

Jim

Krasnow PI to open U St. Art Gallery

Krasnow PI, Paul So, is of course multi-talented. And he’s the leading exemplar of at the Institute of a cadre of researchers who are also serious artists. His new art gallery (appropriately named Hamiltonian) will open soon on U. St. NW, one of the most culturally active neighborhoods in the City. Paul was recently featured in the Washington Business Journal for his efforts in the arts field.

But considering Krasnow’s relatively small size, there are a surprisingly large number of PI artists. Layne Kalbfleisch has exhibited her beautiful photographs both at the Institute and around the DC area. Ernest Barreto is a world-champion whistler, who has been featured in a recent film, Pucker Up. And Giorgio Ascoli is pursuing a lab-wide initiative to build sculptures of brain neurons.

Jim

Krasnow in 2056: II

My hope is that the Institute will have no more than perhaps 150 scientific staff. That’s just a bit more than twice our current size. The reason is that, at least in my experience, scientific research institutions when they grow larger than that, inevitably gain an intermediate layer of bureaucracy–the dreaded mid-level managers. I’m guessing that 50 years from now, interpersonal interactions between real people will still be crucial to maintaining a productive milieu for doing science. Hence, the current growth path (in terms of staff numbers) will have to slow.

On the other hand, I’m imagining that the scientific productivity of our staff will reach a level qualitatively different from what we do now. Part of that will be due to advances in technology which will allow us to finally ask (and answer) some of the hard questions about human consciousness, and part will be due to a new level of data-sharing between researchers around the world. Krasnow scientists will have access to primary experimental data (and therefore be able to test hypotheses) in an open access manner. My hope is that this data-sharing gives us a much larger bang-for-the research buck.

I am also anticipating that Krasnow scientists will be studying cognition and developing theories of neural and machine computation that are much more unified with the rest of our physical model of the universe around us. It seems to me that new hierarchical levels will be added to the ones we currently study (molecules to brains) that connect us both to the quantum world but also to the galactic scale. Perhaps, we will find new rules that constrain intelligence (or at least our complete understanding of the same). Alternatively, perhaps we will find traces of the emergence of human intelligence in the initial events of The Big Bang. These are some of the mysteries for the future.

Jim

What will Krasnow look like in 2056?: I

Over the next several blogposts I’ll imagine a thriving institute for
advanced study in the year 2056, a half-century from now. I’ll be long
gone of course, but my hope is that the Institute will be a world-center
for research, even more-so than it is today–perhaps with science
spanning the fields of astrobiology, anthropology, brain sciences and
new fields that we don’t even have names for today.

Will we be bigger? I imagine yes, but not by that much. Too many PI’s
and management starts to become unwieldy. But our tendrils will be
everywhere: summer school courses at exotic locations, Krasnow PI
authored books translated into many languages and perhaps intelligent
machines (robots) designed at Krasnow exploring the nether reaches of
the solar system.

This will be an optimistic look ahead: one that assumes we’ve got the
world’s current existential problems well in hand. There will be
problems of course–and Institute scientists will be at the forefront of
solving practical problems, but no apocalypse….call me naive.

So let’s look ahead….

Jim