Timetable
15:00-16:00 Hiroyuki Kubota (Kyushu Univ.)
16:00-16:20 Break
16:20-17:20 Yasufumi Uezu (NTT)

Time: 15:00-16:00
Speaker: Hiroyuki Kubota (Kyushu Univ.)
Title: Regulation of insulin action by temporal patterns of insulin

Abstract: Cells respond to various extracellular stimuli through a limited number of signaling pathways. One strategy to process such stimuli is to code the information into the temporal patterns of molecules. Almost all hormones exhibit distinct temporal patterns and the importance of their patterns has been reported. However, the mechanisms of how hormones regulate downstream molecules depending on their temporal patterns remain unknown. We focused on insulin which plays crucial roles on glucose homeostasis and shows several temporal patterns in vivo. In this study, we show how the Insulin signaling pathway processes the information encoded into the temporal patterns of blood insulin using a cultured cell line and mice. We found that insulin patterns selectively regulate the insulin-AKT pathway, metabolites, and mRNAs. Mathematical modeling revealed the mechanisms via differences in network structures and from sensitivity and time constants. Given that almost all hormones exhibit distinct temporal patterns, temporal coding may be a general principle of system homeostasis by hormones.

Time: 16:20-17:20
Speaker: Yasufumi Uezu (NTT)
Title: Source-filter interaction brings various representation in speech and singing voice

Abstract: Speech plays a very important role in human communication. The source-filter interaction, a model that takes into account the actual speech production process, assumes that the sound source generation mechanism and the vocal-tract filter are not independent, but affect each other physiologically and acoustically. It is known that the source-filter interaction brings about non-linearity of speech and singing, such as singing voice with a loud volume and wide pitch range like an opera singer, or voice register transition where the vocal suppression and/or the voice pitch jump occurs. I would like to introduce my researches targeting non-linear vocalization phenomena due to the source-filter interaction and results of measuring and analyzing the time waveform of speech sound and vocal-fold vibrations through measurement experiments.

The astrophysical neutrino events that have been measured in the last couple of years show an isotropic distribution on the sky. To constrain the contribution of source populations to the observed neutrino sky, we consider isotropic and anisotropic components of the diffuse neutrino data. We simulate through-going muon neutrino events by applying statistical distributions for the fluxes of extra-galactic sources and investigate the sensitivities of current (IceCube) and future (IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT)
experiments. I will show that the angular power spectrum is a powerful probe to assess the angular characteristics of neutrino data and demonstrate that we are already constraining rare and bright sources with current IceCube data.
In addition, I will investigate the decay and annihilation of very heavy dark matter as a potential neutrino source suggested by the excess in HESE data. We apply our angular power spectrum analysis to HESE data for different channels, allowing us to interpret the observed neutrino sky and perform a sensitivity forecast.

Topological phases of matter are hot topics in recent physics and related to a wide range of mathematical fields. I will talk about their aspects related to operator algebras. Our emphasis will be on theory of tensor categories which describe interactions of anyons. This theory plays an important role in topological quantum computations.
In theory of operator algebras, Jones initiated theory of subfactors and discovered the Jones polynomial, a new topological invariant for knots as an application. We apply this theory to mathematical studies of anyons.

Gilles Ferrand and Don Warren will run a workshop on using virtual reality (VR) for data visualization and research. Anyone from any RIKEN campus, and any field of study, is welcome. We want to build a cross-disciplinary group of people with a shared interest in VR, and to apply this tool to a broad range of data types and topics.

Please check the workshop website for up-to-date information !

RIKEN Open Campus in Kobe will be held on Nov.9, 2019.
Dr. Emiko Hiyama (Kyushu Univ.) and Dr. Takumi Doi (Nishina Center / iTHEMS) will give lectures on computational nuclear and particle physics at Kobe IIB building where SUURI-COOL Kobe is located. Please inform the news to anybody who are interested in visiting RIKEN Kobe.