Community News

The Journal Club, which meets once a month at the Musashino R&D Center, broadened its scope to include not only reviews of recent papers in scientific journals but also research activities and other areas of interest.

The spring/summer '93 session was launched on March 18th by Ralf Fischer with a talk entitled "A Poor Man's View of Ultrafast Spectroscopy." He gave an overview of optical short-pulse spectroscopy, illustra-ting it with his work on C⁶⁰ buckyballs.

April's Journal Club featured a thought-provoking talk by Arturo Chavez. Drawing on his research on quantum wires, Arturo put forward a new picture of the importance of "self-assembly techniques" for fabrication of reproducible and robust nano-structures.

Gerhard Rigoll gave a lively introduction to neural networks in May's meeting. After introducing neural networks as a simplified mathematical model of networks of biological neurons, Gerhard described ways that networks are trained to learn different processing tasks.

In June, Edouard Geoffrois brought us better under-standing of cognitive sciences through many visual experiments that challenged our brain's perceptions.