Dear ICe community,

We are happy to welcome you to the IX House Symposium of Instituto do Cérebro (ICe) of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Recently, artificial intelligence and interactive language models have become integral to our daily lives. Reflecting this shift, the theme of this year’s IX House Symposium is ‘The Machine and the Brain.

In fact, we are nearing 100 years of progress since Alan Turing’s pioneering work in the 1930s, which introduced the concept of artificial intelligence. This idea has since evolved into digital computers and computer-controlled robots designed to perform tasks typically associated with intelligent beings. Still, the machine is far from as intricate as the brain, for example, we can learn new information by just seeing it once, while artificial systems need to be trained multiple times with the same information. Furthermore, we can learn new information while maintaining the knowledge we already have, while a machine may replace or degrade the previous information. Thereby, in our attempt to add to existing knowledge, studying basic research questions is still fundamental to modern neuroscience.

Over the years our House Symposium has kept steady in turbulent times of political shifts, global pandemics and the tedious physical relocation of labs into our new Instituto do Cérebro at the central campus of UFRN. Glancing back at previous House Symposium we can see that talks and poster numbers remain stable over the years, with exceptions of when groups of international visitors have participated in our meeting (figure below).

This year, the IX House Symposium will feature 14 talks and 30 posters, showcasing the latest findings and providing a comprehensive overview of the past year’s work by the ICe community. Finally we would also like to thank all our collaborators from near and far for contributing to ICe’s research endeavors.

Organizing Committee