Twelfth International Summer School on Mind, Brain and Education
2017 September 1–7
Neuroscience of poverty
Director of the School: Antonio M. Battro
Director of the Course: Sebastián J. Lipina
Codirectors of the Course: Eric Pakulak, María Soledad Segretin
Management Assistance of the Course: Matías Lopez-Rosenfeld
Program Officer of the School: Lula Majdalani
Universidad of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Matías Lopez-Rosenfeld is a Computer Science PhD candidate in Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He got his Licentiate degree from the same University, where he has been a teaching assistant (TA) since 2006. He has taught Computer Science in different contexts, including universities of low socioeconomic status and in jail to prisoners who had never had the opportunity to use a computer. He works in the interjection of Education, Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, focusing in the usage of video games for educational purposes. In 2012, he developed a framework for large-scale interventions using OLPC. This tool allows us to collect children's video-game usage behavior remotely. For his PhD research he has focused on how games are structured and which are the variables that influence the students' performance. Recently, he started a collaboration with a group of developmental psychologists and neuroscientists of the Applied Neurobiology Unit of CONICET in Argentina, which aims at generating algorithms and visualizations for analytical and translational purposes.
Computer and developmental science dialogs on scaling experimental interventions
Nowadays data is produced from a great variety of sources. All around the world data is stored, but only a small part of this information has already been used for scientific purposes. These valuable datasets can be used to understand many events that happen in everyday life. Experimental interventions can themselves be a source of information. They can be used to explain a change in the studied population. In my talk I will focus on data from interventions in low-SES kindergarten and primary schools of Argentina and the possible computer science contributions to this research area. A series of evolution simulations, georeference clusterization as well as population tracing were carried out to explore the dataset. During this project multiple assumptions were adopted and new questions emerged as the result of the interdisciplinary interaction. Although the data used for these analyses was collected by the Unidad de Neurobiología Aplicada (Applied Neurobiology Unit - CONICET) between 2002 and 2012, the real challenge is the development of tools to be used in different contexts, providing enough abstraction to remove the differences within populations.
Authors
Lopez-Rosenfeld, M., Segretin, M.S., & Lipina, S.J.