354 research outputs found
Approximating nonlinear functions with latent boundaries in low-rank excitatory-inhibitory spiking networks
Deep feedforward and recurrent rate-based neural networks have become
successful functional models of the brain, but they neglect obvious biological
details such as spikes and Dale's law. Here we argue that these details are
crucial in order to understand how real neural circuits operate. Towards this
aim, we put forth a new framework for spike-based computation in low-rank
excitatory-inhibitory spiking networks. By considering populations with rank-1
connectivity, we cast each neuron's spiking threshold as a boundary in a
low-dimensional input-output space. We then show how the combined thresholds of
a population of inhibitory neurons form a stable boundary in this space, and
those of a population of excitatory neurons form an unstable boundary.
Combining the two boundaries results in a rank-2 excitatory-inhibitory (EI)
network with inhibition-stabilized dynamics at the intersection of the two
boundaries. The computation of the resulting networks can be understood as the
difference of two convex functions, and is thereby capable of approximating
arbitrary non-linear input-output mappings. We demonstrate several properties
of these networks, including noise suppression and amplification, irregular
activity and synaptic balance, as well as how they relate to rate network
dynamics in the limit that the boundary becomes soft. Finally, while our work
focuses on small networks (5-50 neurons), we discuss potential avenues for
scaling up to much larger networks. Overall, our work proposes a new
perspective on spiking networks that may serve as a starting point for a
mechanistic understanding of biological spike-based computation
Effects of Contact Network Models on Stochastic Epidemic Simulations
The importance of modeling the spread of epidemics through a population has
led to the development of mathematical models for infectious disease
propagation. A number of empirical studies have collected and analyzed data on
contacts between individuals using a variety of sensors. Typically one uses
such data to fit a probabilistic model of network contacts over which a disease
may propagate. In this paper, we investigate the effects of different contact
network models with varying levels of complexity on the outcomes of simulated
epidemics using a stochastic Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model. We
evaluate these network models on six datasets of contacts between people in a
variety of settings. Our results demonstrate that the choice of network model
can have a significant effect on how closely the outcomes of an epidemic
simulation on a simulated network match the outcomes on the actual network
constructed from the sensor data. In particular, preserving degrees of nodes
appears to be much more important than preserving cluster structure for
accurate epidemic simulations.Comment: To appear at International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo)
201
Demixed principal component analysis of neural population data
Neurons in higher cortical areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, are often tuned to a variety of sensory and motor variables, and are therefore said to display mixed selectivity. This complexity of single neuron responses can obscure what information these areas represent and how it is represented. Here we demonstrate the advantages of a new dimensionality reduction technique, demixed principal component analysis (dPCA), that decomposes population activity into a few components. In addition to systematically capturing the majority of the variance of the data, dPCA also exposes the dependence of the neural representation on task parameters such as stimuli, decisions, or rewards. To illustrate our method we reanalyze population data from four datasets comprising different species, different cortical areas and different experimental tasks. In each case, dPCA provides a concise way of visualizing the data that summarizes the task-dependent features of the population response in a single figure
Automated Intelligent Monitoring and the Controlling Software System for Solar Panels
The inspection of the solar panels on a periodic basis is important to improve longevity and ensure performance of the solar system. To get the most solar potential of the photovoltaic (PV) system is possible through an intelligent monitoring & controlling system. The monitoring & controlling system has rapidly increased its popularity because of its user-friendly graphical interface for data acquisition, monitoring, controlling and measurements. In order to monitor the performance of the system especially for renewable energy source application such as solar photovoltaic (PV), data-acquisition systems had been used to collect all the data regarding the installed system. In this paper the development of a smart automated monitoring & controlling system for the solar panel is described, the core idea is based on IoT (the Internet of Things). The measurements of data are made using sensors, block management data acquisition modules, and a software system. Then, all the real-time data collection of the electrical output parameters of the PV plant such as voltage, current and generated electricity is displayed and stored in the block management. The proposed system is smart enough to make suggestions if the panel is not working properly, to display errors, to remind about maintenance of the system through email or SMS, and to rotate panels according to a sun position using the Ephemeral table that stored in the system. The advantages of the system are the performance of the solar panel system which can be monitored and analyzed
Neural Decision Boundaries for Maximal Information Transmission
We consider here how to separate multidimensional signals into two
categories, such that the binary decision transmits the maximum possible
information transmitted about those signals. Our motivation comes from the
nervous system, where neurons process multidimensional signals into a binary
sequence of responses (spikes). In a small noise limit, we derive a general
equation for the decision boundary that locally relates its curvature to the
probability distribution of inputs. We show that for Gaussian inputs the
optimal boundaries are planar, but for non-Gaussian inputs the curvature is
nonzero. As an example, we consider exponentially distributed inputs, which are
known to approximate a variety of signals from natural environment.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Discovering and Predicting Temporal Patterns of WiFi-interactive Social Populations
Extensive efforts have been devoted to characterizing the rich connectivity
patterns among the nodes (components) of such complex networks (systems), and
in the course of development of research in this area, people have been
prompted to address on a fundamental question: How does the fascinating yet
complex topological features of a network affect or determine the collective
behavior and performance of the networked system? While elegant attempts to
address this core issue have been made, for example, from the viewpoints of
synchronization, epidemics, evolutionary cooperation, and the control of
complex networks, theoretically or empirically, this widely concerned key
question still remains open in the newly emergent field of network science.
Such fruitful advances also push the desire to understand (mobile) social
networks and characterize human social populations with the interdependent
collective dynamics as well as the behavioral patterns. Nowadays, a great deal
of digital technologies are unobtrusively embedded into the physical world of
human daily activities, which offer unparalleled opportunities to explosively
digitize human physical interactions, who is contacting with whom at what time.
Such powerful technologies include the Bluetooth, the active Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) technology, wireless sensors and, more close to our
interest in this paper, the WiFi technology. As a snapshot of the modern
society, a university is in the coverage of WiFi signals, where the WiFi system
records the digital access logs of the authorized WiFi users when they access
the campus wireless services. Such WiFi access records, as the indirect proxy
data, work as the effective proxy of a large-scale population's social
interactions.Comment: 11 pages, 10 page
Treatment of mild and moderate type-2 diabetes: open prospective trial with Hintonia latiflora extract
Probing Real Sensory Worlds of Receivers with Unsupervised Clustering
The task of an organism to extract information about the external environment from sensory signals is based entirely on the analysis of ongoing afferent spike activity provided by the sense organs. We investigate the processing of auditory stimuli by an acoustic interneuron of insects. In contrast to most previous work we do this by using stimuli and neurophysiological recordings directly in the nocturnal tropical rainforest, where the insect communicates. Different from typical recordings in sound proof laboratories, strong environmental noise from multiple sound sources interferes with the perception of acoustic signals in these realistic scenarios. We apply a recently developed unsupervised machine learning algorithm based on probabilistic inference to find frequently occurring firing patterns in the response of the acoustic interneuron. We can thus ask how much information the central nervous system of the receiver can extract from bursts without ever being told which type and which variants of bursts are characteristic for particular stimuli. Our results show that the reliability of burst coding in the time domain is so high that identical stimuli lead to extremely similar spike pattern responses, even for different preparations on different dates, and even if one of the preparations is recorded outdoors and the other one in the sound proof lab. Simultaneous recordings in two preparations exposed to the same acoustic environment reveal that characteristics of burst patterns are largely preserved among individuals of the same species. Our study shows that burst coding can provide a reliable mechanism for acoustic insects to classify and discriminate signals under very noisy real-world conditions. This gives new insights into the neural mechanisms potentially used by bushcrickets to discriminate conspecific songs from sounds of predators in similar carrier frequency bands
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