Alejo Salles

Juan de Monasterio, Alejo Salles, Carolina Lang et al.

Chagas disease is a neglected disease, and information about its geographical spread is very scarse. We analyze here mobility and calling patterns in order to identify potential risk zones for the disease, by using public health information and mobile phone records. Geolocalized call records are rich in social and mobility information, which can be used to infer whether an individual has lived in an endemic area. We present two case studies in Latin American countries. Our objective is to generate risk maps which can be used by public health campaign managers to prioritize detection campaigns and target specific areas. Finally, we analyze the value of mobile phone data to infer long-term migrations, which play a crucial role in the geographical spread of Chagas disease.

Pablo Tano, Sergio Romano, Mariano Sigman et al.

Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most of these studies is to reveal the underlying language structuring these representations and providing a general substrate for thought. However, describing a model of thought that is fixed once trained is against the extensive literature that shows how experience shapes concept learning. Here, we ask about the plasticity of these symbolic descriptive languages. We perform a concept learning experiment that demonstrates that humans can change very rapidly the repertoire of symbols they use to identify concepts, by compiling expressions which are frequently used into new symbols of the language. The pattern of concept learning times is accurately described by a Bayesian agent that rationally updates the probability of compiling a new expression according to how useful it has been to compress concepts so far. By portraying the Language of Thought as a flexible system of rules, we also highlight the difficulties to pin it down empirically.