My Work and Thoughts.
By dmodha
"It is a brain map like no other, has been three years in the making, and promises a revolution in neuroscience: a genomic atlas of the mouse brain has been crafted."
"…the Allen Brain Atlas contains 85 million images, and enough data to fill 20,000 iPods. The atlas documents the activity of more than 21,000 genes across the entire mouse brain in such fine detail that it is possible pick out individual cells."
Also, Paul Allen was named this month to Scientific American 50 list.
By dmodha
Today, we had an incredible time with Professor Bruno Olshausen who heads the Redwood Center at UC Berkeley, and is Associate Professor, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and School of Optometry, UC Berkeley.
He described the state-of-the-art in the knowledge about the primary visual cortex (V1). Here is the abstract:
Nervous systems have evolved impressive abilities to extract useful information about the environment from images. This talk will review some highlights of what has been learned from a combination of psychophysical, neurophysiological, and computational studies of the visual system, in addition to those aspects that remain a mystery. I will also describe some new organizing principles which provide hope for elucidating the function of visual cortex.
By dmodha
At Supercomputing 06 conference, the 28th TOP 500 Supercomputing Sites List was released.
Please see the original article at: http://top500.org/lists/2006/11
"IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s)".
The BlueGene/L at IBM’s Almaden Research Center ranked 64th on the list with a Linpack performance of 9.43 teraflops, for details, please see: http://top500.org/list/2006/11/100
By dmodha
Dr. Gerry Tesauro is a Research Staff Member in computer science at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. He is famous for developing TD-Gammon a self-teaching program that learned to play backgammon at human world championship level. TD-Gammon uses reinforcement learning — a well known technique in Machine Learning that has a close connection to the role of dopamine neurons in the brain.
Gerry was invited to Almaden by Nimrod Megiddo, and gave us a wonderful talk on how he is applying reinforcement learning to improving system management policies.
References:
1. Gerald Tesauro, Nicholas K. Jong, Rajarshi Das, Mohamed N. Bennani: Improvement of Systems Management Policies Using Hybrid Reinforcement Learning. ECML 2006: 783-791
2. Gerald Tesauro: Online Resource Allocation Using Decompositional Reinforcement Learning. AAAI 2005: 886-891
3. Gerald Tesauro: Temporal Difference Learning and TD-Gammon. Commun. ACM 38(3): 58-68 (1995)
By dmodha
Today, we had a wonderful time with Dr. Srini Narayanan who leads the AI Group at ICSI and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley.
Here is abstract of the talk:
The UCB/ICSI NTL project has been developing an explicitly neural theory of language. The core premise is that language is largely determined by the computational character of neural networks, the structure of our brains, and our interactions with the physical and social environment. Work within the NTL project coupled with a variety of converging evidence suggests that understanding involves embodied enactment or "simulation semantics".
Simulation semantics hypothesizes the mind as "simulating" the external world while functioning in it. The "simulation" takes sensory input about the state of the world (whether linguistic or perceptual) together with general knowledge and makes new inferences. Monitoring the state of the external world, drawing inferences, and acting jointly constitute a dynamic ongoing interactive process.
We report on a neurally plausible, computational realization of the simulation semantics hypothesis, and on preliminary results from behavioral and fMRI imaging experiments testing its biological predictions.
The core ideas of NTL are captured in a recent book, From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language, by Professor Jerome Feldman.