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Neuron Digest Volume 05 Number 01
Neuron Digest Tuesday, 3 Jan 1989 Volume 5 : Issue 1
Today's Topics:
Administrivia
NSF Program in Knowledge Models and Cognitive Systems
ICSI talk - Modularity in Phonetic Neural Nets
ICSI talk - Making Boltzman learning efficient
Memory/Attention: BBS Call for Commentators
Motor Control: BBS Call for Commentators
CFP - 11th Annual Conference of the CogSci Society - Ann Arbor, Michigan
INTERFACE Special Issue on Music and Dynamic Systems
Send submissions, questions, address maintenance and requests for old issues to
"neuron-request@hplabs.hp.com" or "{any backbone,uunet}!hplabs!neuron-request"
------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Administrivia
From: "Peter Marvit" <neuron-request@hplabs.hp.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 88 14:00:00 -PST
[[ Arbitrarily, this issue begins Volume 5. I expect I'll make one Volume
per semester, but am open to suggestions. I have a bit of a backlog from
the holidays so you'll be seeing several issues in a short time.
Back issues of the Digest are now available with anonymous ftp from
hplpm.hpl.hp.com (15.255.16.205) in the directory pub/Neuron-Digest. That
directory contains subdirectories of each volume, under which are all the
issues. I'm also collecting simulation sofware in pub/Neuron-Software.
Contributions are welcome. I had tabled requests for back issues pending
this setup. Please let me know if you need back issues mailed. -PM]]
------------------------------
Subject: NSF Program in Knowledge Models and Cognitive Systems
From: "Henry J. Hamburger" <hhamburg@note.nsf.gov>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 88 11:41:11 -0500
[[ Editor's note: This originally appeared in AILIST, but is undoubtable of
interest to readers of this Digest. -PM ]]
I am including my AILIST message. Work on neural nets for vision and
"low-level" stuff go to Ken Laws, who is program director for Robotics and
Machine Intelligence. He is at klaws@b.nsf.gov. -- Henry Hamburger.
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
---------------------------
PROGRAM in
----------
KNOWLEDGE MODELS and COGNITIVE SYSTEMS
--------------------------------------
Knowledge Models and Cognitive Systems is a relatively new name at NSF, but
the Program has significant continuity with earlier related programs. This
holds for its scientific subject matter and also with regard to its
researchers, who come principally from computer science and the cognitive
sciences (with artificial intelligence in the intersection). Many such
individuals are also interested in areas supported by other NSF programs,
especially in this division -- the Division of Information, Robotics and
Intelligent Systems (IRIS) -- and in the Division of Behavioral and Neural
Sciences.
This unofficial message has two parts. The first is a top-down description
of the major areas of current Program support. There follows a list of some
particular topics in which there is strong current activity in the Program
and/or perceived future opportunity. Anyone needing further information can
contact the Program Director, Henry Hamburger, who is also the sender of
this item. Please use e-mail if you can: hhamburg@b.nsf.gov or else phone:
202-357-9569. To get a copy of the Summary of Awards for this division
(IRIS), call 202-357-9572
Many of you will be hearing from me with requests to review proposals. To
be sure they are of interest to you, feel free to send me a list of topics
or subfields.
MAJOR AREAS of CURRENT SUPPORT
------------------------------
The Program in Knowledge Models and Cognitive Systems supports research
fundamental to the general understanding of knowledge and cognition, whether
in humans, computers or, in principle, other entities. Major areas
currently receiving support include (i) formal models of knowledge and
information, (ii) natural language processing and (iii) cognitive systems.
Each of these areas is described and subcategorized below.
Applicants do not classify their proposals in any official way. Indeed
their work may be relevant to two or all three of the categories (or
conceivably to none of them). In particular, it is recognized that language
is intertwined with (or part of) cognition and that formality is a matter of
degree. For work that falls only partly within the program, the program
director may conduct the evaluation jointly with another program, within or
outside the division. Descriptions of the three areas follow.
FORMAL MODELS of KNOWLEDGE and INFORMATION:
- --------------------------------------------
Recent work supported under the category Formal Models of Knowledge and
Information divides into formal models of three things: (i) knowledge, (ii)
information, and (iii) imperfections in the two. In each case, the models
may encompass both representation and manipulation. For example, formal
models of both knowledge representation and inference are part of the
knowledge area.
The distinction between knowledge and information is that a piece of
knowledge tends to be more structured and/or comprehensive than a piece of
information. Imperfections may include uncertainty, vagueness,
incompleteness and abductive rules. Many investigations contribute to two
or all three categories, yet emphasize one.
COGNITIVE SYSTEMS
- -----------------
Four recognized areas currently receive support within Cognitive Systems:
(i) knowledge representation and inference, (ii) highly parallel approaches,
(iii) machine learning, and (iv) computational characterization of human
cognition.
The first area is characterized by symbolic representations and a high
degree of structure imposed by the programmer, in an attempt to represent
complex entities and carry out complex tasks involving planning and
reasoning. The second area may have similar long-term goals but takes a
very different approach. It includes studies based on a high degree of
parallelism among relatively simple processing units connected according to
various patterns. The third area, machine learning, has emerged as a
distinct area of study, though the choice between symbolic and connectionist
approaches is clearly relevant. In all of the first three areas, the
research may be informed to a greater or lesser degree by scientific
knowledge of the nature of high- level human cognition. Characterizing such
knowledge in computational form is the objective of the fourth area.
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
- ---------------------------
Recent work supported under the category Natural Language Processing is in
three overlapping areas: (i) computational aspects of syntax, semantics and
the lexicon, (ii) discourse, dialog and generation, and (iii) systems
issues. The distinction between the first two often involves such
intersentential concerns as topic, plan, and situation. Systems issues
include the interaction and unified treatment of various kinds of modules.
TOPICS of STRONG CURRENT ACTIVITY and
-------------------------------------
OPPORTUNITY for FUTURE RESEARCH
-------------------------------
Comments on this list are welcome. It has no official status, is subject to
change, and, most important, is intended to be suggestive, not prescriptive.
The astute reader will notice that many of these topics transcend the neat
categorization above.
Reasoning and planning in the face of imperfect information and a changing
world
- reasoning about reasoning itself: the time
and resources taken, and the consequences
- use and formal understanding of
temporal and nonmonotonic logic
- integration of numerical and symbolic approaches
to uncertainty, imprecision and justification
- multi-agent planning, reasoning,
communication and coordination
Interplay of human and computational languages
- commonalities in the semantic formalisms
for human and computer languages
- extending knowledge representation systems to
support formal principles of human language
- principles of extended dialog between humans
and complex software systems, including
those of the new computational sciences
Machine Learning of Classification,
Problem-Solving and Scientific Laws
- formal analysis of what features and parameter
settings of both method and domain are
responsible for successes.
- reconciling and combining the benefits of
connectionist, genetic and symbolic approaches
- evaluating the relevance to learning of AI
tools: planning, search, and learning itself
------------------------------
Subject: ICSI talk - Modularity in Phonetic Neural Nets
From: baker%icsi.Berkeley.EDU@berkeley.edu (Paula Ann Baker)
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 88 10:13:07 -0800
The International Computer Science Institute
is pleased to present a talk
Thursday, December 15, 1988 2 p.m.
"Modularity in Phonetic Neural Networks"
Alex Waibel
Carnegie Mellon University
We show here that neural networks for speech recognition can be constructed
in a modular fashion by exploiting the hidden structure of previously
trained phonetic subcategory networks. The performance of resulting larger
phonetic nets was found to be as good as the performance of the subcomponent
nets by themselves. This approach avoids the excessive learning times that
would be necessary to train larger networks and allows for incremental
learning (generally not easily possible in networks that inhibit incorrect
output categories).
This talk will be held in the Main Lecture Hall at ICSI.
1947 Center Street, Suite 600, Berkeley, CA 94704
(On Center between Milvia and Martin Luther King Jr. Way)
------------------------------
Subject: ICSI talk - Making Boltzman learning efficient
From: baker%icsi.Berkeley.EDU@berkeley.edu (Paula Ann Baker)
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 88 10:13:20 -0800
The International Computer Science Institute
is pleased to present a talk:
Friday, December 16, 1988 2 p.m.
"How to make Boltzmann learning efficient and neurally plausible"
Geoffrey Hinton
University of Toronto
The Boltzmann machine learning procedure is easy to implement but very
inefficient because of sampling errors. The same procedure can be applied
in a deterministic "mean field" approximation that does not suffer from
sampling errors, but it is not obvious that the learning will converge. I
shall show that deterministic Boltzmann learning performs steepest descent
in the natural performance measure. I shall also show that the learning
automatically creates the symmetry that is required for the algorithm to
work. This makes deterministic Boltzmann learning more neurally plausible
than back-propagation.
This talk will be held in the Main Lecture Hall at ICSI.
1947 Center Street, Suite 600, Berkeley, CA 94704
(On Center between Milvia and Martin Luther King Jr. Way)
------------------------------
Subject: Memory/Attention: BBS Call for Commentators
From: harnad@Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad)
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 88 09:36:57 -0500
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article to appear in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary
journal that provides Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial
current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators
must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a current BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator on this article, to suggest other appropriate
commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please
send email to:
harnad@confidence.princeton.edu or write to:
BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542 [tel: 609-921-7771]
____________________________________________________________________
Keywords: selective attention, echoic memory, cortical localization,
audition, orienting response, automatic processing
THE ROLE OF ATTENTION IN AUDITORY INFORMATION PROCESSING
AS REVEALED BY EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS
Risto Naatanen
Department of Psychology
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
This target article examines the roles of attention and automaticity in
auditory processing as revealed by event-related potential (ERP) research.
An ERP component called the "mismatch negativity" indicates that physical
and temporal features of auditory stimuli are fully processed whether or not
they are attended. It also suggests that there exists a mechanism of passive
attention switching with changes in repetitive input. ERPs also reveal some
of the cerebral mechanisms by which acoustic stimulus events produce and
control conscious perception. The "processing negativity" component
implicates a mechanism for attending selectively to stimuli defined by
certain physical features. Stimulus selection occurs in the form of a
matching process in which each input is compared to the "attentional trace,"
a voluntarily maintained representation of the task-relevant features of the
stimulus to be attended.
------------------------------
Subject: Motor Control: BBS Call for Commentators
From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad)
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Date: 14 Dec 88 15:13:03 +0000
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article to appear in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary
journal that provides Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial
current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators
must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a current BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator on this article, to suggest other appropriate
commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please
send email to:
harnad@confidence.princeton.edu or write to:
BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542 [tel: 609-921-7771]
____________________________________________________________________
ON THE FUNCTION OF MUSCLE AND REFLEX PARTITIONING
Uwe Windhorst (Physiology, Gottingen University)
Thomas M. Hamm (Barrow Neurological Institute)
Douglas G. Stewart (University of Arizona)
Localized stretch reflexes, the partitioning of sensory input for muscles,
and the partitioning of segmental pathways to motor nuclei have been
demonstrated in the mammalian neuromuscular system. This suggests that
individual motor nuclei and the muscles they innervate are not homogeneous
functional units. Functional analysis of reflex localization and
partitioning suggests that segmental control mechanisms are based on
subdivisions of motor nucleus/muscle complexes. A partitioned organization
of segmental control mechanisms may provide a number of functional
advantages for the control of neuromuscular systems with complex structure
and organization.
------------------------------
Subject: CFP - 11th Annual Conference of the CogSci Society
From: visel@CSMIL.UMICH.EDU (Suzanne Visel)
Organization: Congnitive Science and Machine Intelligence Laboratory
Date: 14 Dec 88 20:59:03 +0000
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Eleventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
August 16-19, 1989
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
The Eleventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society will be held
August 16-19, 1989 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This precedes the IJCAI meeting in Detroit the following week. The
Conference will feature symposia and invited speakers on such topics as
induction, decision theory, situated cognition, applications of cognitive
science, language processing, problem solving, cognitive development and
parallel distributed systems. The Conference schedule will include paper
sessions, symposia, and a poster session covering the full range of the
cognitive sciences. This year, for the first time, a pre-conference
tutorial will be offered.
Organizing Committee:
Gary M. Olson
Director, Cognitive Science and
Machine Intelligence Laboratory
University of Michigan
Edward E. Smith
Professor of Psychology
University of Michigan
Call for Papers
You are invited to submit papers for paper presentations, symposia and
poster sessions. These should cover original unreported theoretical or
empirical research related to cognition. All submissions for paper and
poster sessions and symposia will be refereed. The Proceedings of the
Conference will be published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Send submissions to:
Gary M. Olson
Cognitive Science and Machine Intelligence Laboratory
701 Tappan Street
Graduate School of Business
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1234
Inquiries:
E-mail address: gmo@csmil.umich.edu
Phone: (313) 747-4948
All submitted papers must include the following:
Four copies of the full paper (8 pages maximum including tables, figures,
references and a 250 word abstract).
Preference for poster or paper presentation.
Please include your electronic mail address.
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: March 31, 1989
Acceptance notification: May 1, 1989
Final version due: May 26, 1989
Tutorial: Wednesday, August 16, 1989
Conference: Thursday-Saturday, August 17-19, 1989
------------------------------
Subject: INTERFACE Special Issue on Music and Dynamic Systems
From: MUSICO@BGERUG51.BITNET
Organization: The Internet
Date: 15 Dec 88 09:46:00 +0000
INTERFACE Call for Commentators and/or Original Contributions.
--------------------------
MUSIC AND DYNAMIC SYSTEMS
=========================
INTERFACE - Journal of New Music Research - is an international
journal published by Swets & Zeitlinger B.V., Lisse, The Netherlands (this
year vol. 17). It is devoted to the discussion of all questions which fall
into the borderline areas between music on the one hand, physical and human
sciences or related technologies on the other hand. New fields of research,
as well as new methods of investigation in known fields receive special
emphasis.
INTERFACE is planning a special issue on MUSIC AND DYNAMIC SYSTEMS.
The motivation comes from two sources :
First there is the renewed interest in Dynamic Systems Theory from the
point of view of massive parallel computing and artificial intelligence
research. Massive parallel techniques and technology have very recently
been applied to music perception/cognition and to strategies for automated
composition. The approach is an alternative to the classical symbol-based
approaches to cognition and problem solving and it is believed that it may
establish a new paradigm that dominates research for the coming decennia.
The second motivation comes from a recently received original
contribution to INTERFACE by two Romenian scientists : Cosmin and Mario
Georgescu. They propose a system approach to musicology based on the
General Systems Theory. The paper ("A System Approach to Music") is
challenging in that it raises a number of methodological problems (e.g.
problems of verification) in musicology. The authors claim that "The paper
should be considered primarily as an exposition of principles and as an
argument in favour of the credibility degree of the system approach in
musicology. The change of this approach into an effective analysis tool for
musical work is a future task that goes beyond the aim of this paper.".
However, General Systems Theory is by no means the only possible
application of Systems Theory to music. The massive parallel approach in
computing and the application of Dynamic Systems Theory to the field of
music perception and cognition, automated compositional strategies, or
historical musicology allows new insights in our understanding and
comprehention of the complex phenomenon which we all admire. How far can we
go in modeling the complex dynamics of MUSIC?
--------------------------
- Contributions to this special issue of INTERFACE on MUSIC AND DYNAMIC
SYSTEMS may be sent to Marc Leman before june 30 (publication of this issue
is planned in the fall of 1989).
- Commentators interested in the Georgescu's paper (61pp.) may ask for a
copy.
---------------------------
Please send your correspondence for this issue to :
Marc Leman (editor)
University of Ghent
Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music
Blandijnberg 2
B-9000 GHENT
Belgium
e-mail : musico@bgerug51.bitnet
The address of the publisher is :
Swets Publishing Service
Heereweg 347
2161 CA Lisse
The Netherlands
------------------------------
End of Neurons Digest
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