Our first new member is Christoph Ladroue, who will be working on WP5 with Jianfeng Feng's group at Warwick for the next 15 months. Christoph has a dual training in Mathematics and Computer Science. His PhD was dedicated to the development of machine learning techniques for the automatic classification of medical data, specifically magnetic resonance spectra of brain tumours. His interest then extended to more general data analyses of signals, using methods like Independent Component Analysis. He has also done some more theoretical work while at the department of Statistics at Warwick University, where he studied systems of differential equations that exhibit a multiscale behaviours. Now working with Jianfeng Feng's group, he is investigating new methods for uncovering casual relationships between temporal signals from neuroscience.

Our next new face is Mike Weeks. An RA in JIm Austin's ACA Group (University of York) since 2000, Mike has been recruited to the development team (WP0) to provide additional software development capability as we move into implementation of the CARMEN system. He is a core developer on the AURA library (including hardware and distributed AURA implementations) and the PRESENCE hardware platforms. Mike has also worked on several other projects, including the AURA Graph-matcher engine, image and face recognition systems, hardware text search engines, fraud detection systems, and grid-based JDBC drivers.

Finally Hannah Francis joins us as CARMEN's new project secretary. A recent graduate from Durham University in English studies, Hannah's role as project secretary is her first graduate job. Her time is split between CARMEN, to which she will devote half her time, with the other half focussed on the Spike Train Analysis Network and the Baker Lab Group at Newcastle University; and her responsibilities include organising meetings and events, up-dating websites and just generally ensuring that people, equipment and information are all where they need to be on time. She is truly excited to be working in something so new to her as neuroscience and hopes to gain as many different experiences from the post as possible.