Integrated Calendar

Nature has created mechanisms to detect salient objects like food, prey or mates. Visual search is the process of shifting gaze from one salient object to another. It has both a stimulus driven bottom-up component as well as a task-driven top-down component. This is well studied in human and primates but not so much in other animals. It is, therefore, a challenge to increase our understanding of visual search in non-primate animals. The barn owl is a predator having frontally oriented eyes, but lacking eye movements. Because of such specializations, this bird offers itself for the study of visual search. We study mechanisms of visual search in this animal on both the behavioural and neurophysiological levels. In this talk I will present our main findings on these matters.

A quantum computer holds the promise of solving some problems that are beyond the reach of the most powerful supercomputers. Due to theoretical and experimental breakthroughs in the last few years, we are now at a point where the feeling grows that a large-scale quantum computer can actually be built. Increasingly, this requires bridging the disciplines, from physics to engineering, materials science and computer science. In this talk, I will present the start-of-the-art in quantum computing and outline the challenges ahead, with a focus on electron spin qubits in semiconductors.