The University of Trento was part of the Italian delegation that, a few days ago, attended the First South Korea-Italy bilateral Symposium on neuroscience and neuroinformatics hosted by KAIST (the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), one of the major public research institutes in Asia located in the science park of Daedeok, South Korea’s fifth largest city.
KAIST is a research and development cluster including about sixty public and private research institutes (among which are the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute).
The symposium represented a great opportunity for Italian research. Its purpose was to bring together researchers of cognitive and computational neuroscience from Italy and Korea to discuss and establish collaborations among research institutes that share the same interest in understanding how the brain works.
Participating in this type of events is essential to establish more successful cooperation agreements and joint research projects that can obtain international funding and better share research data and innovative technologies.
The Italian delegation, led by the science attaché at the Italian Embassy in South Korea, Francesco Canganella, included Carlo Miniussi (director of CIMeC) and Massimo Turatto (full Professor of Experimental Psychology at CIMeC), from the University of Trento, with Stefano Panzeri (director of the Italian Institute of Technology – IIT in Rovereto) and Paolo Avesani (Fondazione Bruno Kessler).
The participants in the meetings were able to establish a strong collaboration network.
The University of Trento and KAIST are planning to open a student exchange programme and to start a collaboration in neuroscience and neuroinformatics involving students and researchers, who will spend some time studying in Korea.
The visit to Korea also inspired the idea to organize the next bilateral symposium in Trento in 2018.
The University of Trento was able to take advantage of the event to present its research work in the sector of neuroscience: CIMeC director, Professor Miniussi, presented some research projects in the area of neuroimaging.
Professor Turatto presented the research studies carried out by the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology of the University of Trento, which investigate different human cognitive processes.