Local and global gating of synaptic plasticity

Mechanisms influencing learning in neural networks are usually investigated on either a local or a global scale. The former relates to synaptic processes, the latter to unspecific modulatory systems. Here we study the interaction of a local learning rule that evaluates coincidences of pre- and postsynaptic action potentials and a global modulatory mechanism, such as the action of the basal forebrain onto cortical neurons. The simulations demonstrate that the interaction of these mechanisms leads to a learning rule supporting fast learning rates, stability, and flexibility. Furthermore, the simulations generate two experimentally testable predictions on the dependence of backpropagating action potential on basal forebrain activity and the relative timing of the activity of inhibitory and excitatory neurons in the neocortex.We are grateful to Konrad Körding and Mike Merzenich for valuable discussions of the previous work on the learning rule and the experimental data and Daniel Kiper for comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We are happy to acknowledge the support of SPP Neuroinformatics (grants 5002–44888/2&3 to P. F. M. J. V.), SNF (grant 31-51059.97, awarded to P. K.), and an FPU grant from MEC (M. A. S.-M., Spain)

The effect of low number of points in clustering validation via the negentropy increment

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Neurocomputing. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Neurocomputing, 74, 16, (2011) DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2011.03.023Selected papers of the 10th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (IWANN2009)We recently introduced the negentropy increment, a validity index for crisp clustering that quantifies the average normality of the clustering partitions using the negentropy. This index can satisfactorily deal with clusters with heterogeneous orientations, scales and densities. One of the main advantages of the index is the simplicity of its calculation, which only requires the computation of the log-determinants of the covariance matrices and the prior probabilities of each cluster. The negentropy increment provides validation results which are in general better than those from other classic cluster validity indices. However, when the number of data points in a partition region is small, the quality in the estimation of the log-determinant of the covariance matrix can be very poor. This affects the proper quantification of the index and therefore the quality of the clustering, so additional requirements such as limitations on the minimum number of points in each region are needed. Although this kind of constraints can provide good results, they need to be adjusted depending on parameters such as the dimension of the data space. In this article we investigate how the estimation of the negentropy increment of a clustering partition is affected by the presence of regions with small number of points. We find that the error in this estimation depends on the number of points in each region, but not on the scale or orientation of their distribution, and show how to correct this error in order to obtain an unbiased estimator of the negentropy increment. We also quantify the amount of uncertainty in the estimation. As we show, both for 2D synthetic problems and multidimensional real benchmark problems, these results can be used to validate clustering partitions with a substantial improvement.This work has been funded by DGUI-CAM/UAM (Project CCG10-UAM/TIC-5864

Confirmation of an exoplanet using the transit color signature: Kepler-418b, a blended giant planet in a multiplanet system

We announce confirmation of Kepler-418b, one of two proposed planets in this system. This is the first confirmation of an exoplanet based primarily on the transit color signature technique. We used the Kepler public data archive combined with multicolor photometry from the Gran Telescopio de Canarias and radial velocity follow-up using FIES at the Nordic Optical Telescope for confirmation. We report a confident detection of a transit color signature that can only be explained by a compact occulting body, entirely ruling out a contaminating eclipsing binary, a hierarchical triple, or a grazing eclipsing binary. Those findings are corroborated by our radial velocity measurements, which put an upper limit of ~1 Mjup on the mass of Kepler-418b. We also report that the host star is significantly blended, confirming the ~10% light contamination suspected from the crowding metric in the Kepler light curve measured by the Kepler team. We report detection of an unresolved light source that contributes an additional ~40% to the target star, which would not have been detected without multicolor photometric analysis. The resulting planet-star radius ratio is 0.110 +/- 0.0025, more than 25% more than the 0.087 measured by Kepler, leading to a radius of 1.20 +/- 0.16 Rjup instead of the 0.94 Rjup measured by the Kepler team. This is the first confirmation of an exoplanet candidate based primarily on the transit color signature, demonstrating that this technique is viable from ground for giant planets. It is particularly useful for planets with long periods such as Kepler-418b, which tend to have long transit durations. Additionally, multicolor photometric analysis of transits can reveal unknown stellar neighbors and binary companions that do not affect the classification of the transiting object but can have a very significant effect on the perceived planetary radius.Comment: accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysic

Evaluation of negentropy-based cluster validation techniques in problems with increasing dimensionality

The aim of a crisp cluster validity index is to quantify the quality of a given data partition. It allows to select the best partition out of a set of potential ones, and to determine the number of clusters. Recently, negentropy-based cluster validation has been introduced. This new approach seems to perform better than other state of the art techniques, and its computation is quite simple. However, like many other cluster validation approaches, it presents problems when some partition regions have a small number of points. Different heuristics have been proposed to cope with this problem. In this article we systematically analyze the performance of different negentropy-based validation approaches, including a new heuristic, in clustering problems of increasing dimensionality, and compare them to reference criteria such as AIC and BIC. Our results on synthetic data suggest that the newly proposed negentropy-based validation strategy can outperform AIC and BIC when the ratio of the number of points to the dimension is not high, which is a very common situation in most real applications.The authors thank the financial support from DGUI-CAM/UAM (Project CCG10-UAM/TIC-5864

An autonomous robot that learns approach-avoidance behaviors: lessons from the brain to the robot

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the I Jornadas Técnicas de la ETS de Informática, held in Madrid on 200

Fast response and coherent oscillations in small-world Hodgkin-Huxley neural networks

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the I Jornadas Técnicas de la ETS de Informática, held in Madrid on 200

A comparison of techniques for robust gender recognition

Reprinted, with permission, from [Rojas Bello, R.N., Lago Fernández, L.F., Martínez Muñoz, G., y Sánchez Montañés, M.A., A comparision of techniques for robust gender recognition, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP 2011]. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.Proceedings of 2011 18th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 11-14 Sept. 2011, BrusselsAutomatic gender classification of face images is an area of growing interest with multiple applications. Appropriate classifiers should be robust against variations such as illumination, scale and orientation that occur in real world applications. This can be achieved by normalizing the images in order to reduce those variations (alignment, re-scaling, histogram-equalization, etc.), or by extracting features from the original images which are invariant respect to those variations. In this work we perform a robust comparison of eight different classifiers across 100 random partitions of a set of frontal face images. Four of them are state-of-the-art methods in automatic gender classification that use image normalization (SVMs, Neural Networks, ADABOOST and PCA+LDA). The other four strategies use invariant features extracted by SIFT (BOW, Evidence Random Trees, NBNN and Voted Nearest-Neighbor). The best strategies are SVM using normalized images and NBNN, the latter having the advantage that no strong image pre-processing is needed.This work has been supported by CDTI (project INTEGRA) and DGUICAM/UAM (project CCG10-UAM/TIC-5864

El Cisma de Occidente

A pesar de que pueda parecer que la Iglesia siempre ha sido una institución fuerte y centralizada que ha sobrevivido con la misma estructura el paso de los siglos, hubo un tiempo en que la propia jerarquización se vio cuestionada desde el interior y a punto estuvo de suponer una disgregación de la misma. Eso fue lo que ocurrió entre los años 1378 y 1417, cuando surgieron una sucesión de personajes que reclamaban ser los legítimos poseedores de la dignidad papal. El presente trabajo analiza los acontecimientos que se sucedieron durante esos años tanto en la obediencia romana como en la aviñonesa, en sus relaciones entre ellas y sus implicaciones en la vida política de la Europa del momento, con especial atención a las relaciones con Aragón y a la vida de Benedicto XIII, hasta la solución conciliar. Se incluyen, por último, unos anexos con los que se busca facilitar la comprensión de hechos puntuales en el desarrollo del Cisma