Dr. Neil Johnson (University of Miami)
Tuesday August 22nd 2017 - 7:00 pm ET
101 Jordan Hall of Science
How fast can you blink your eye, or clap your hands? Sure, one or two cups of coffee and a good night’s sleep might help speed things up — but the fact is that there are large-scale, ultrafast systems operating 24/7 on which our livelihoods and pensions depend, but in which there is no hope of real-time human intervention when things go wrong since they are limited only by the speed of light. In fact, the science of such systems is not well understood — in particular, the extreme events or ‘Black Swans’ which are like digital tsunamis. In this talk I present an explicit discussion of one such ultrafast electronic system which is closer to home than you might think. But I also describe how improving our understanding of this system can help our understanding of potentially all others. And this includes the most complex network system of them all — the human brain.
