Periodic Reporting for period 2 - COSMOS (Complex Oscillatory Systems: Modeling and Analysis)
Berichtszeitraum: 2017-01-01 bis 2019-08-31
COSMOS is pursuing three main objectives:
• The development of methods for the identification of the relevant variables describing collective dynamics of coupled oscillators (top-down)
• The extraction of relevant information from multivariate-data recorded in complex oscillatory systems (bottom-up)
• Integration of the two approaches for cross validation and refinement; implementation of the findings in software toolboxes for the use of unskilled users
developed. The highlight of the common activities was an international conference “Analysis and Modeling of Complex Oscillatory Systems” (AMCOS) held at Barcelona (March 2018). It was completely prepared and conducted by ESRs. This conference attracted world-leading researchers (altogether 119 attendees from 20 countries), contributed enormously to visibility of the COSMOS research and provided invaluable experience in essential transferrable skills to all ESRs. Final conference (Novo Mesto, September 2018) was devoted to discussions of the projects and potential fields of further collaborations.
During the 2nd reporting period, the ESRs advanced enormously in their research projects, as documented in 39 publications in leading peer-review journals, and a total of 71 presentations at different Conferences. All ESRs participated at different types of outreach activities, ranging from talks for high-school students, to youtube tutorials.
In the frame of “bottom-up” work package, methods of inference have been developed and applied to synthetic and real data. One overlapping topic was characterization of spike trains. In a series of papers, ESR17 developed methods of reconstructing networks of pulse- coupling oscillators, without any preliminary knowledge about their properties. Work of ESR8 was concentrated on the characterization of similarities and diversities in spike trains. Furthermore, he developed measures of spike train synchrony for data with multiple time scales, and quantified consistency in spatio-temporal propagation patterns. ESR10 characterized robustness and versatility of a nonlinear interdependence method for directional coupling detection from spike trains. Another overlapping topic was network reconstruction. Work of ESR4 concentrated on the analysis of degree distributions of reconstructed networks in dependence on the statistics of false positive and false negative
conclusions about the links. ESR14 and 10 collaboratively studied, how a rank-based connectivity measure can be used to infer the network connections. Furthermore, ESR14 developed a method of evolutionary optimization of network reconstruction from derivative-variable correlations. A problem of cardio-respiratory interactions was attacked by ESR16. He developed a method of disentangling respiratory and non-respiratory components in the heart phase dynamics, and applied this to real physiological measurements. Significance is very important in the practical data analysis. Here ESR6 contributed by comparing different surrogate data techniques for hypothesis testing. In the frame of integration and comparison of different approaches, the consortium delivered 9 publicly available software packages summarizing created methods and techniques.
The ITN-EJD has contributed to train specialists in complex oscillatory systems, able to cope with different challenging setups from physics, engineering and biology, to apply multidisciplinary approaches, and to communicate top-level science to general public. Throughout academic and industrial secondments, the ESRs gained a broad palette of research methods, with an additional focus on transferrable skills such as entrepreneurship, presentation and communication. They are well-prepared to cope with complex data appearing in different fields of science, technology, and society. Through close interaction between beneficiaries and industrial partners, the ESRs developed excellent networking potential and good chances of further career development.