Publications related to Physicalism

Bacterial colonization in realistic environments: how mechanics impact biofilm formation in the wild and during infection

A variety of physical inputs acts onto bacteria in nature. However, these are most often ignored in the studies of their physiology. There is now increasing evidence indicating that bacteria respond to physical stimuli, including mechanical forces. Yet, qu ...

EPFL2023

Why computational complexity may set impenetrable barriers for epistemic reductionism

Michael Herzog, Christian Sachse, Adrien Christophe Doerig

According to physicalism, everything is physical or metaphysically connected to the physical. If physicalism were true, it seems that we should - in principle - be able to reduce the descriptions and explanations of special sciences to physical ones, for e ...

Springer2023

When do Minimax-fair Learning and Empirical Risk Minimization Coincide?

Volkan Cevher

Minimax-fair machine learning minimizes the error for the worst-off group. However, empirical evidence suggests that when sophisticated models are trained with standard empirical risk minimization (ERM), they often have the same performance on the worst-of ...

2023

The irreducibility of vision: Gestalt, crowding and the fundamentals of vision

Michael Herzog

What is fundamental in vision has been discussed for millennia. For philosophical realists and the physiological approach to vision, the objects of the outer world are truly given, and failures to perceive objects properly, such as in illusions, are just s ...

2022

Advances in Magnetics Roadmap on Spin-Wave Computing

Qian Wang, Dirk Grundler, Xiuwei Zhang, Yiming Li

Magnonics addresses the physical properties of spin waves and utilizes them for data processing. Scalability down to atomic dimensions, operation in the GHz-to-THz frequency range, utilization of nonlinear and nonreciprocal phenomena, and compatibility wit ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2022

Building perception block by block: a response to Fekete et al

Michael Herzog, Frank Scharnowski, Adrien Christophe Doerig

Is consciousness a continuous stream, or do percepts occur only at certain moments of time? This age-old question is still under debate. Both positions face difficult problems, which we proposed to overcome with a 2-stage model, where unconscious processin ...

Oxford University Press (OUP)2019

From experimental evidence to mechanical modeling and design expressions: The Critical Shear Crack Theory for shear design

Aurelio Muttoni, Miguel Fernández Ruiz

Many research efforts have so far been devoted to the topic of shear design of members without transverse reinforcement since the first development in structural concrete. This has allowed a number of significant advances in the understanding of the phenom ...

2019

Cities, from Information to Interaction

João Vitor Meirelles de Miranda

From physics to the social sciences, information is now seen as a fundamental component of reality. However, a form of information seems still underestimated, perhaps precisely because it is so pervasive that we take it for granted: the information encoded ...

2018

Transient Materialization

Shih-Yuan Wang

This dissertation seeks to bring material experimentation to the forefront of design by associating it with computation and fabrication technologies that challenge the current disciplines of digital fabrication in architecture. The idea of transient materi ...

EPFL2017

A view on global urbanization : spatial networks, urban scaling and remote sensing

Emanuele Strano

It is widely recognized that global urbanization is one the most urgent issue of our time. Any problem related to global issues, such as climate change, social and environmental sustainability and the future of our society, is somehow related to cities and ...

EPFL2016

Why our best theories of perception lead to Anti-reductionism

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig

Basic percepts and observation sentences, such as "the voltmeter is at 7A", provide the ground truth for realistic theories. Reduction is the second backbone of these theories linking, for example, neuroscience to physics. First, we will show, by mathemati ...

2016

Data Reconciliation in Open Reaction Systems using the Concept of Extents

Dominique Bonvin, Julien Léo Billeter, Sriniketh Srinivasan

Kinetic models of chemical reaction systems are typically represented in terms of state variables, such as concentrations, temperature and partial pressures [1]. These state variables in turn depend on the underlying reactions, transfer phenomena, and tran ...

2015

Phase-resolved particle size distribution: New insight into material characterization

Christian Ludwig, Andrea Testino

Particle size distribution (PSD) is a relevant property of powdered solid matter since it directly influences the functionality of solid products such as pharmaceutics, cosmetics, abrasives, ceramics, metals, pigments, catalysts, and chemical reactants. Se ...

Elsevier2015

Investigations on the physical factors influencing the ear canal occlusion effect caused by hearing aids

Hervé Lissek, Thomas Stefan Zurbrügg

The occlusion effect refers to the altered perception of one's own voice when the ear canal is fully or partially obstructed. While the loudness increase due to body conducted sounds requires an assessment by psychoacoustic methods, the ratio of sound pres ...

Hirzel Verlag2014

Punching shear design in MC2010: incorporating new knowledge and grounding design expressions on physical models

Aurelio Muttoni, Miguel Fernández Ruiz

Model Code 2010 (MC2010) has presented a deep review on punching shear design with respect to previous versions of Model Code (1978, 1990). These changes have been motivated by the fact that MC2010 is grounded on a physical theory rather than on empirical ...

fib Symposium Tel-Aviv 20132013

A comment on the construction of the maximal globally hyperbolic Cauchy development

Willie Wai Yeung Wong

Under mild assumptions, we remove all traces of the axiom of choice from the construction of the maximal globally hyperbolic Cauchy development in general relativity. The construction relies on the notion of direct union manifolds, which we review. The con ...

American Institute of Physics2013

Data-Driven MRSI Spectral Localization Via Low-Rank Component Analysis

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Jeffrey Adam Kasten

Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) is a powerful tool capable of providing spatially localized maps of metabolite concentrations. Its utility, however, is often depreciated by spectral leakage artifacts resulting from low spatial resolution me ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2013

Polarity Assignment in ZnTe, GaAs, ZnO, and GaN-AlN Nanowires from Direct Dumbbell Analysis

Anna Fontcuberta i Morral, Martin Heiss, Bo Peng

Aberration corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) with high angle annular dark field (HAADF) imaging and the newly developed annular bright field (ABF) imaging are used to define a new guideline for the polarity determination of semicon ...

American Chemical Society2012

A whole-brain voxel based measure of intrinsic connectivity contrast reveals local changes in tissue connectivity with anesthetic without a priori assumptions on thresholds or regions of interest

Roberto Martuzzi

The analysis of spontaneous fluctuations of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals has recently gained attention as a powerful tool for investigating brain circuits in a non-invasive manner. Correlation-based connectivity analysis investigate ...

2011

The effects of mutual location-awareness on group coordination

Pierre Dillenbourg, Nicolas Nova

The importance of space and place in collaborative practices has been strengthened with the ubiquitous computing paradigm, which aims at the integration of computation in physical objects and places. New location-based applications allow users to know wher ...

2010