1,195 research outputs found
How Insight Emerges in a Distributed, Content-addressable Memory
We begin this chapter with the bold claim that it provides a neuroscientific
explanation of the magic of creativity. Creativity presents a formidable
challenge for neuroscience. Neuroscience generally involves studying what
happens in the brain when someone engages in a task that involves responding to
a stimulus, or retrieving information from memory and using it the right way,
or at the right time. If the relevant information is not already encoded in
memory, the task generally requires that the individual make systematic use of
information that is encoded in memory. But creativity is different. It
paradoxically involves studying how someone pulls out of their brain something
that was never put into it! Moreover, it must be something both new and useful,
or appropriate to the task at hand. The ability to pull out of memory something
new and appropriate that was never stored there in the first place is what we
refer to as the magic of creativity. Even if we are so fortunate as to
determine which areas of the brain are active and how these areas interact
during creative thought, we will not have an answer to the question of how the
brain comes up with solutions and artworks that are new and appropriate. On the
other hand, since the representational capacity of neurons emerges at a level
that is higher than that of the individual neurons themselves, the inner
workings of neurons is too low a level to explain the magic of creativity. Thus
we look to a level that is midway between gross brain regions and neurons.
Since creativity generally involves combining concepts from different domains,
or seeing old ideas from new perspectives, we focus our efforts on the neural
mechanisms underlying the representation of concepts and ideas. Thus we ask
questions about the brain at the level that accounts for its representational
capacity, i.e. at the level of distributed aggregates of neurons.Comment: 17 pages; 2 figure
Content-Aware Reduction of Bit Flips in Phase Change Memory
The energy costs of Phase Change Memory (PCM) depends almost completely on the number of bits written per time unit. By using an encoding, we can reduce the number of bit flips when overwriting low-entropy data with low-entropy data. This is achieved by using a frequency table for bytes in classes of data to select the encoding. Using various corpora of mainly HTML files, we show that we can reduce the number of bit flips by about 0.5 bit flips per byte
From Attention to Engagement: The Transformation of the Content Industry
This presentation was given by Lear Center Director Martin Kaplan at a public forum in Barcelona. The event was sponsored by the Barcelona Media Center
The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019
An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains
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