21,189 research outputs found
Take another little piece of my heart: a note on bridging cognition and emotions
Science urges philosophy to be more empirical and philosophy urges science to be more reflective. This markedly occurred along the “discovery of the artificial” (CORDESCHI 2002): in the early days of Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers aimed at making machines more cognizant while setting up a framework to better understand human intelligence.
By and large, those genuine goals still hold today, whereas AI has become more concerned with specific aspects of intelligence, such as (machine) learning, reasoning, vision, and action. As a matter of fact, the field suffers from a chasm between two formerly integrated aspects. One is the engineering endeavour involving the development of tools, e.g., autonomous systems for driving cars as well as software for semantic information retrieval. The other is the philosophical debate that tries to answer questions concerning the nature of intelligence. Bridging these two levels can indeed be crucial in developing a deeper understanding of minds.
An opportunity might be offered by the cogent theme of emotions. Traditionally, computer science, psychological and philosophical research have been compelled to investigate mental processes that do not involve mood, emotions and feelings, in spite of Simon’s early caveat (SIMON 1967) that a general theory of cognition must incorporate the influences of emotion.
Given recent neurobiological findings and technological advances, the time is ripe to seriously weigh this promising, albeit controversial, opportunity
The Emergence of Canalization and Evolvability in an Open-Ended, Interactive Evolutionary System
Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional
organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the
evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate
by generating a more adaptive pool of offspring. One hypothesized mechanism for
evolvability is developmental canalization, wherein certain dimensions of
variation become more likely to be traversed and others are prevented from
being explored (e.g. offspring tend to have similarly sized legs, and mutations
affect the length of both legs, not each leg individually). While ubiquitous in
nature, canalization almost never evolves in computational simulations of
evolution. Not only does that deprive us of in silico models in which to study
the evolution of evolvability, but it also raises the question of which
conditions give rise to this form of evolvability. Answering this question
would shed light on why such evolvability emerged naturally and could
accelerate engineering efforts to harness evolution to solve important
engineering challenges. In this paper we reveal a unique system in which
canalization did emerge in computational evolution. We document that genomes
entrench certain dimensions of variation that were frequently explored during
their evolutionary history. The genetic representation of these organisms also
evolved to be highly modular and hierarchical, and we show that these
organizational properties correlate with increased fitness. Interestingly, the
type of computational evolutionary experiment that produced this evolvability
was very different from traditional digital evolution in that there was no
objective, suggesting that open-ended, divergent evolutionary processes may be
necessary for the evolution of evolvability.Comment: SI can be found at: http://www.evolvingai.org/files/SI_0.zi
Deep learning systems as complex networks
Thanks to the availability of large scale digital datasets and massive
amounts of computational power, deep learning algorithms can learn
representations of data by exploiting multiple levels of abstraction. These
machine learning methods have greatly improved the state-of-the-art in many
challenging cognitive tasks, such as visual object recognition, speech
processing, natural language understanding and automatic translation. In
particular, one class of deep learning models, known as deep belief networks,
can discover intricate statistical structure in large data sets in a completely
unsupervised fashion, by learning a generative model of the data using
Hebbian-like learning mechanisms. Although these self-organizing systems can be
conveniently formalized within the framework of statistical mechanics, their
internal functioning remains opaque, because their emergent dynamics cannot be
solved analytically. In this article we propose to study deep belief networks
using techniques commonly employed in the study of complex networks, in order
to gain some insights into the structural and functional properties of the
computational graph resulting from the learning process.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure
Hierarchy of neural organization in the embryonic spinal cord: Granger-causality graph analysis of in vivo calcium imaging data
The recent development of genetically encoded calcium indicators enables
monitoring in vivo the activity of neuronal populations. Most analysis of these
calcium transients relies on linear regression analysis based on the sensory
stimulus applied or the behavior observed. To estimate the basic properties of
the functional neural circuitry, we propose a network-based approach based on
calcium imaging recorded at single cell resolution. Differently from previous
analysis based on cross-correlation, we used Granger-causality estimates to
infer activity propagation between the activities of different neurons. The
resulting functional networks were then modeled as directed graphs and
characterized in terms of connectivity and node centralities. We applied our
approach to calcium transients recorded at low frequency (4 Hz) in ventral
neurons of the zebrafish spinal cord at the embryonic stage when spontaneous
coiling of the tail occurs. Our analysis on population calcium imaging data
revealed a strong ipsilateral connectivity and a characteristic hierarchical
organization of the network hubs that supported established propagation of
activity from rostral to caudal spinal cord. Our method could be used for
detecting functional defects in neuronal circuitry during development and
pathological conditions
A nonuniform popularity-similarity optimization (nPSO) model to efficiently generate realistic complex networks with communities
The hidden metric space behind complex network topologies is a fervid topic
in current network science and the hyperbolic space is one of the most studied,
because it seems associated to the structural organization of many real complex
systems. The Popularity-Similarity-Optimization (PSO) model simulates how
random geometric graphs grow in the hyperbolic space, reproducing strong
clustering and scale-free degree distribution, however it misses to reproduce
an important feature of real complex networks, which is the community
organization. The Geometrical-Preferential-Attachment (GPA) model was recently
developed to confer to the PSO also a community structure, which is obtained by
forcing different angular regions of the hyperbolic disk to have variable level
of attractiveness. However, the number and size of the communities cannot be
explicitly controlled in the GPA, which is a clear limitation for real
applications. Here, we introduce the nonuniform PSO (nPSO) model that,
differently from GPA, forces heterogeneous angular node attractiveness by
sampling the angular coordinates from a tailored nonuniform probability
distribution, for instance a mixture of Gaussians. The nPSO differs from GPA in
other three aspects: it allows to explicitly fix the number and size of
communities; it allows to tune their mixing property through the network
temperature; it is efficient to generate networks with high clustering. After
several tests we propose the nPSO as a valid and efficient model to generate
networks with communities in the hyperbolic space, which can be adopted as a
realistic benchmark for different tasks such as community detection and link
prediction
Googling the brain: discovering hierarchical and asymmetric network structures, with applications in neuroscience
Hierarchical organisation is a common feature of many directed networks arising in nature and technology. For example, a well-defined message-passing framework based on managerial status typically exists in a business organisation. However, in many real-world networks such patterns of hierarchy are unlikely to be quite so transparent. Due to the nature in which empirical data is collated the nodes will often be ordered so as to obscure any underlying structure. In addition, the possibility of even a small number of links violating any overall “chain of command” makes the determination of such structures extremely challenging. Here we address the issue of how to reorder a directed network in order to reveal this type of hierarchy. In doing so we also look at the task of quantifying the level of hierarchy, given a particular node ordering. We look at a variety of approaches. Using ideas from the graph Laplacian literature, we show that a relevant discrete optimization problem leads to a natural hierarchical node ranking. We also show that this ranking arises via a maximum likelihood problem associated with a new range-dependent hierarchical random graph model. This random graph insight allows us to compute a likelihood ratio that quantifies the overall tendency for a given network to be hierarchical. We also develop a generalization of this node ordering algorithm based on the combinatorics of directed walks. In passing, we note that Google’s PageRank algorithm tackles a closely related problem, and may also be motivated from a combinatoric, walk-counting viewpoint. We illustrate the performance of the resulting algorithms on synthetic network data, and on a real-world network from neuroscience where results may be validated biologically
MuxViz: A Tool for Multilayer Analysis and Visualization of Networks
Multilayer relationships among entities and information about entities must
be accompanied by the means to analyze, visualize, and obtain insights from
such data. We present open-source software (muxViz) that contains a collection
of algorithms for the analysis of multilayer networks, which are an important
way to represent a large variety of complex systems throughout science and
engineering. We demonstrate the ability of muxViz to analyze and interactively
visualize multilayer data using empirical genetic, neuronal, and transportation
networks. Our software is available at https://github.com/manlius/muxViz.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures (text of the accepted manuscript
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