Overview of the projects aquired in November
In November, important funds were aquired, allowing our researchers to continue their work on ARIS projects. We were successful in aquiring one such project at UP IAM and two at UP FAMNIT.
Linear codes through special classes of functions–relationship and design
Project lead: dr. Enes Pasalic
Project type: basic project
Lead organization: UP IAM
ABOUT THE PROJECT: The main goal of this project is to refine our understanding of certain combinatorial objects (mainly some specific classes of (vectorial) Boolean functions) and the design of linear codes that are characterized with some additional properties that are proved useful in certain cryptographic applications. To name a few, these applications may concern implementation of secret sharing schemes (using minimal linear codes) or error-correcting codes in the context of postquantum cryptography (via self-orthogonal codes). The proposed project aims at finding further connections between certain important discrete structures which may increase our knowledge about their structural behaviour.
The emergence and nature of compositional thought through predictive processing
Project lead: dr. Danaja Rutar
Project type: basic project
Lead organization: UP FAMNIT
ABOUT THE PROJECT: Humans are unique in their ability to think infinitely many thoughts by re-combining concepts –ability that relies on compositional representations. Compositionality means that a limited number of primitives (key operations or functions that underlie understanding of concepts) can be flexibly re-combined to produce more complex thoughts according to some combinatorial rules. Whilst a key feature of human higher cognition, interestingly, young children do not possess compositional representations. Our project aims to establish the theoretical and empirical foundations for understanding the emergence and the structure of logical compositional representations in predictive processing (PP). We will address this aim through investigating two developmental and a PP objective. Our first objective: is to examine what the structure of such pre-compositional representations is and how they develop into compositional representations. The second objective is to investigate what set of primitives and compositional rules underlies compositional representations and whether this set efficiently minimises prediction error. The third objective is to cast the findings from the first two objectives in terms of the PP mechanisms. PP is a unifying theory of cognition, perception, and action, explaining them through a single set of core mechanisms, thus promising a great explanatory power (Clark, 2013).
Exploring the analgesic potential of herkinorin: an integrated approach to safer opioids
Project lead: dr. Samo Lešnik
Project type: basic project
Lead organization: UM FKKT
UP partner: UP FAMNIT
Other aquired projects at UP are available HERE.