The Interdisciplinary College is a 1-week spring school on brain sciences & artificial intelligence. It is: * Interdisciplinary: with courses from Neurobiology, Neuroscience and Neural Computation, Mathematical Modeling, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Philosophy; * Demanding: in a day-round programme, prime researchers give focussed introductions to their research, with highlighting evening lectures; European-international:

The continuum percolation problem of permeable and isotropically oriented sticks (with the form of capped cylinders) is reconsidered by Monte Carlo simulations in three dimensions. Errors in earlier studies are revealed and results in agreement with the excluded volume rule are presented. Finite-size effects are discussed.

Coalition setting among a set of actors (countries, firms, individuals) is studied using concepts from the theory of spin glasses. Given the distribution of respective bilateral propensities to either cooperation or conflict, the phenomenon of local aggregation is modeled. In particular the number of coalitions is determined according to a minimum conflict principle. It is found not to be always two. Along these lines, previous studies are revisited

(AN I.B.R.O. NEUROSCIENCE SCHOOL) August 19th - September 13th, 2002, OBIDOS, PORTUGAL DIRECTORS: Klaus Obermayer (Technical University Berlin, Germany) Alessandro Treves (SISSA, Trieste, Italy) Eilon Vaadia (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel) Alain Destexhe (CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France) LOCAL ORGANIZER: Vasco Galhardo (University of Porto, Portugal) The EU Advanced Course in Computational Neuroscience introduces students to the panoply of problems

La Fondation Fyssen a pour objectif général "de promouvoir sous toutes ses formes l'analyse scientifique des mécanismes logiques du comportement animal et humain ainsi que leur développement ontogénétique et phylogénétique". La Fondation Fyssen attribuera un certain nombre de bourses d'études post-doctorales. Ces bourses doivent permettre la formation et le soutien de chercheurs de niveau post-doctoral travaillant dans des domaines de recherche

Courses: * Jeff Elman (University of California at San Diego, USA) - Connectionist Models of Learning and Development * Michael Mozer (University of Colorado, USA) - Connectionist Models of Human Perception, Attention, and Awareness * Eran Zaidel (University of California at Los Angeles, USA) - Hemispheric Specialization * Barbara Knowlton (University of California at Los Angeles, USA) - Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory * Markus Knauff (University