Group items tagged

First evidence for associative learning in plants ?

The work of our team on the Mimosa Pudica has been publish! It proves for the first time the ability of plants to learn. After a countless number of rejections, Oecologia had the courage of publishing it. Now the road is open to demonstrations that learning capability exists not only in sensitive plants, but also in normal plants. This can change the entire biology. A bit rhetorical, but real.

very nice!!! congratulations! what are you working on now - also on this?

I work on some aspects of plant to plant communication! I hope to publish soon something equally exciting!! and of course I will let you know!!

I knew it !!!

maybe 90' is too much but we ve been saying for so long about the power nap and never actually did it. I think the management tries to promote only politically correct methods for more creativity and new ways of working etc etc and neglects the potential power naps could have for some of us. I suggest as a first step a pillow on the desk and leaning on it after lunch for 10 - 15 '

new interesting neuroscience article ... how can we learn from this for AI?

> how can we learn from this for AI? After reading the abstract only... it appears a bit too low-level to be relevant...

Cristina learns aesthetics.

seems to be a big resource for learning documents

Learnability cannot be proven! An important theoretical brick on machine learning capabilities.

I'm afraid I take some issue with this rather glorious title. I've only skimmed this paper but looking at the experimental details, their 'imagined universes' comprise of a ball confined in a 2D space as well as a double pendulum. Work along this area is nothing new - it's known in the control community as Inverse Reinforcement Learning - learning dynamics of some system from demonstration trajectories. The paper title ('Toward an AI Physicist for Unsupervised Learning') is more moderate so yet again the issue is how AI is reported in the media...

Based in OxRAM... Looking forward to further details.

A new idea called the "information bottleneck" is helping to explain the puzzling success of today's artificial-intelligence algorithms - and might also explain how human brains learn.

An intelligent (that is, self-adaptive) cloak driven by deep learning. Quite cool, eh? Something we can get inspired by?

For hardcore latex users (btw ... implemented in haskell ... classical machine learning app, but useful)

Also available as Android app (not sure if called "texify" or "detexify".

works actually quite well!!

Data-Visualization Firm's New Software Autonomously Finds Abstract Connections --> Annalisa?

I had a nice introduction about Ordinal Regression via Manifold Learning by Francisco last week. It is doubtless a very actual research branch!

I doubt :) The original paper from Liu is from 2011 and has .... wait for it .... 1 quotation (and a self-one)!!! http://scholar.google.it/scholar?hl=it&q=Ordinal+Regression+via+Manifold+Learning&btnG=&lr=

A nice quartz article about research in neuromorphic hardware in micro/nanotech out there and future vision of the field.

"Two sets of [ ATV docking training for astronauts ] lessons are now available for the home user to try." And in case you wonder *where* in the earth are they available, the links are on the right-hand column (also known as ESA's scorn on usability). As usual for the material located there, I took me a few minutes to find them...

Well I tried and could not locate the app to download from these links and sent them a feedback on what I thought a wrong error - though the email bounced :-) So, what is the right link to the app then?

Leo, I'm not iEnabled, so I can't help you with the app. Using other links you can try the PC version (so 20th-century-ish, I know), of course assuming you have somewhere one with Internet Explorer :-)

How would you like to have the ability to play the piano downloaded into your brain?

you also get one step closer to the moon when climbing a mountain - though you will never reach it this way ...

HUBbub 2013 is the annual conference for researchers, educators, and IT professionals engaged in building and using cyberinfrastructure. Learn about the latest features in the HUBzero tool box and how they can be used to address the unique challenges of scientific pursuits.

It is probably more interesting to check the parent site: hubzero.org: HUBzero ® is a powerful, open source software platform for creating dynamic web sites that support scientific research and educational activities.

what an interesting personality ... very symathetic Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize - and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".

Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

Higgs revealed that his career had also been jeopardised by his disagreements in the 1960s and 7

And the follow up by Nobel prize winner Randy Schekman http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals

interesting one - Luzi will like it :-)

I have no idea if an algorithm based on this already exists, but it would certainly be a good one for autonomous AI, I think. I think an algorithm based on this should be able to select his own input parameters and reject them if they are not stimulated any further or integrate them in the algorithm if they are continiously stimulated... this could enable self learning, etc.

By steering the neuron's back to an intermediate activity level the mechanism probably optimizes their efficiency within the network (after all a neuron that fires all the time is just as useless as one that never fires).