Neural Networks From Biology To High Energy Physics Proceedings Of The Third Workshop

The papers appearing in this proceedings volume cover a broad range of subjects, owing to the highly cross-disciplinary character of the workshop, and include: experiments and models concerning the dynamics of the neural activity in the cortex (DMS experiments, attractor dynamics in the cortex, spontaneous activity…); hippocampus, space and memory; theoretical advances in neural network modeling; information processing in neural networks; applications of neural networks to experimental physics, particularly to high energy physics; digital and analog hardware implementations of neural networks; etc.

Neural network models, in addition to being of intrinsic theoretical interest, have also proved to be a useful framework in which issues in theoretical biology can be put into perspective. These issues include, amongst others, modelling the activity of the cortex and the study of protein folding. More recently, neural network models have been extensively investigated as tools for data analysis in high energy physics experiments. These workshop proceedings reflect the strongly interdisciplinary character of the field and provide an updated overview of recent developments.

At the fascinating frontiers of neurobiology, mathematics and psychophysics, this book addresses the problem of human and computer vision on the basis of cognitive modeling. After recalling the physics of light and its transformation through media and optics, Hérault presents the principles of the primate's visual system in terms of anatomy and functionality. Then, the neuronal circuitry of the retina is analyzed in terms of spatio-temporal filtering. This basic model is extended to the concept of neuromorphic circuits for motion processing and to the processing of color in the retina. For more in-depth studies, the adaptive non-linear properties of the photoreceptors and of ganglion cells are addressed, exhibiting all the power of the retinal pre-processing of images as a system of information cleaning suitable for further cortical processing. As a target of retinal information, the primary visual area is presented as a bank of filters able to extract valuable descriptors of images, suitable for categorization and recognition and also for local information extraction such as saliency and perspective. All along the book, many comparisons between the models and human perception are discussed as well as detailed applications to computer vision.

This volume features the complete text of the material presented at the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Papers have been loosely grouped by topic and an author index is provided in the back. As in previous years, the symposium included an interesting mixture of papers on many topics from researchers with diverse backgrounds and different goals, presenting a multifaceted view of cognitive science. In hopes of facilitating searches of this work, an electronic index on the Internet's World Wide Web is provided. Titles, authors, and summaries of all the papers published here have been placed in an online database which may be freely searched by anyone. You can reach the web site at: www-csli.stanford.edu/cogsci97.

This volume includes papers presented at the Fifth Annual Computational Neurosci ence meeting (CNS*96) held in Boston, Massachusetts, July 14 - 17, 1996. This collection includes 148 of the 234 papers presented at the meeting. Acceptance for mceting presenta tion was based on the peer review of preliminary papers originally submitted in May of 1996. The papers in this volume represent final versions of this work submitted in January of 1997. As represented by this volume, computational neuroscience continues to expand in quality, size and breadth of focus as increasing numbers of neuroscientists are taking a computational approach to understanding nervous system function. Defining computa tional neuroscience as the exploration of how brains compute, it is clear that there is al most no subject or area of modern neuroscience research that is not appropriate for computational studies. The CNS meetings as well as this volume reflect this scope and di versity.