EPJ Plus Managing Editor Martine Ben Amar wins Huy Duong Bui prize

Details

Published on 23 April 2019

Professor Martine Ben Amar (Sorbonne Université, Paris), Managing Editor of EPJ Plus, is the 2018 recipient of the Huy Duong Bui prize - attributed by the French Academy of Sciences for outstanding work in the fields of Mechanics, Computer Science and Astrophysics - for her pioneering work on continuum mechanical models of biological systems.

The publishers and the EPJ Plus journal team congratulate Martine Ben Amar on this prestigious achievement.

https://www.academie-sciences.fr/fr/Laureats/laureate-2018-du-prix-huy-duong-bui-martine-ben-amar.html

EPJ Data Science Highlight - Offline biases in online platforms

Details

Published on 09 April 2019

Online booking platforms such as Airbnb or Uber present themselves as and strive to be inclusive, but there is an increasing amount of both anecdotal and scientific evidence of discriminatory behavior among their users. In a study published in EPJ Data Science, researchers at University College London set out to evaluate interaction patterns within Airbnb, in an effort to understand the extent to which offline human biases influence affects their users.

Read the guest post by Giacomo Livan, Licia Capra, Weihua Li and Victoria Koh on the SpringerOpen blog

EPJ ST Highlight - Infinite number of quantum particles gives clues to big-picture behaviour at large scale

Details

Published on 09 April 2019

Scientists gain a deeper understanding of phenomena at macroscopic scale by simulating the consequences of having an infinite number of physical phenomena at quantum scale

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents an external observer from measuring both the position and speed (referred to as momentum) of a particle at the same time. They can only know with a high degree of certainty either one or the other - unlike what happens at large scales where both are known. To identify a given particle’s characteristics, physicists introduced the notion of quasi-distribution of position and momentum. This approach was an attempt to reconcile quantum-scale interpretation of what is happening in particles with the standard approach used to understand motion at normal scale, a field dubbed classical mechanics.

In a new study published in EPJ Special Topics, Dr J.S. Ben-Benjamin and colleagues from Texas A&M University, USA, reverse this approach; starting with quantum mechanical rules, they explore how to derive an infinite number of quasi-distributions, to emulate the classical mechanics approach. This approach is also applicable to a number of other variables found in quantum-scale particles, including particle spin.

Read more...