257,419 research outputs found
A State of the Art of Governance Literature on adaptation to climate change. Towards a research agenda
This report provides a state-of-the-art overview of governance literature on adaptation strategies. What has recent research taught us on adaptation from the perspective of governance and to what research agenda does this lead? This report is structured as followed. Firstly, it will be argued why adaptation is a matter of governance. Secondly, the research methods for the literature study will be outlined. Thirdly, the results of the literature study will portray the findings in terms of the themes and foci with, respectively, environmental studies, spatial planning and development studies, and public administration studies. Finally, a comparative analysis of these findings will lead to a research agenda for future research on governance of adaptatio
Learning as a phenomenon occurring in a critical state
Recent physiological measurements have provided clear evidence about
scale-free avalanche brain activity and EEG spectra, feeding the classical
enigma of how such a chaotic system can ever learn or respond in a controlled
and reproducible way. Models for learning, like neural networks or perceptrons,
have traditionally avoided strong fluctuations. Conversely, we propose that
brain activity having features typical of systems at a critical point,
represents a crucial ingredient for learning. We present here a study which
provides novel insights toward the understanding of the problem. Our model is
able to reproduce quantitatively the experimentally observed critical state of
the brain and, at the same time, learns and remembers logical rules including
the exclusive OR (XOR), which has posed difficulties to several previous
attempts. We implement the model on a network with topological properties close
to the functionality network in real brains. Learning occurs via plastic
adaptation of synaptic strengths and exhibits universal features. We find that
the learning performance and the average time required to learn are controlled
by the strength of plastic adaptation, in a way independent of the specific
task assigned to the system. Even complex rules can be learned provided that
the plastic adaptation is sufficiently slow.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Addressing Appearance Change in Outdoor Robotics with Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Appearance changes due to weather and seasonal conditions represent a strong
impediment to the robust implementation of machine learning systems in outdoor
robotics. While supervised learning optimises a model for the training domain,
it will deliver degraded performance in application domains that underlie
distributional shifts caused by these changes. Traditionally, this problem has
been addressed via the collection of labelled data in multiple domains or by
imposing priors on the type of shift between both domains. We frame the problem
in the context of unsupervised domain adaptation and develop a framework for
applying adversarial techniques to adapt popular, state-of-the-art network
architectures with the additional objective to align features across domains.
Moreover, as adversarial training is notoriously unstable, we first perform an
extensive ablation study, adapting many techniques known to stabilise
generative adversarial networks, and evaluate on a surrogate classification
task with the same appearance change. The distilled insights are applied to the
problem of free-space segmentation for motion planning in autonomous driving.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017
What is the functional role of adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus?
The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampal memory system and special in
that it generates new neurons throughout life. Here we discuss the
question of what the functional role of these new neurons might be. Our
hypothesis is that they help the dentate gyrus to avoid the problem of
catastrophic interference when adapting to new environments. We assume
that old neurons are rather stable and preserve an optimal encoding
learned for known environments while new neurons are plastic to adapt to
those features that are qualitatively new in a new environment. A simple
network simulation demonstrates that adding new plastic neurons is indeed
a successful strategy for adaptation without catastrophic interference
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