Anomalous Diffusion Workshop

The workshop, which brings together a multidisciplinary community of scientists, includes oral presentations by the top-ranking participants of the AnDi Challenge and invited speakers. Since Albert Einstein provided a theoretical foundation for Robert Brown’s observation of the movement of particles within pollen grains suspended in water, significant deviations from the laws of Brownian motion have been uncovered in a variety of animate and inanimate systems, from biology to the stock market. Anomalous diffusion, as it has come to be called, is connected to non-equilibrium phenomena, flows of energy and information, and transport in living systems.

Identifying the physical origin of this behavior and calculating its exponent ? is crucial to understand the nature of the systems under observation. However, the measurement of these properties from the data analysis of trajectories is often limited especially for trajectories that are short, irregularly sampled or featuring mixed behaviors. In the last years, several methods have been proposed to quantify anomalous diffusion, going beyond the classical calculation of the mean squared displacement.

The AnDi Challenge aims at bringing together a multidisciplinary community of scientists working on this problem. The use of the same reference datasets will allow an unbiased assessment of the performance of published and unpublished methods for characterizing anomalous diffusion from single trajectories.