How emergent self organizing maps can help counter domestic violence.

Topographic maps are an appealing exploratory instrument for discovering new knowledge from databases. During the past years, new types of Self Organizing Maps (SOM) were introduced in the literature, including the recent Emergent SOM. The ESOM is used to study a large set of police reports describing a whole range of violent incidents that occurred during the year 2007 in the police region Amsterdam-Amstelland (the Netherlands). It is demonstrated that it provides an exploratory search instrument for examining unstructured text in police reports. First, it is shown how the ESOM was used to discover a whole range of new features that better distinguish domestic from non-domestic violence cases. Then, it is demonstrated how this resulted in a significant improvement in classification accuracy. Finally, the ESOM is showcased as a powerful instrument for the domain expert interested in an indepth investigation of the nature and scope of domestic violence.

Analyzing domestic violence with topographic maps: a comparative study.

Topographic maps are an appealing exploratory instrument for discovering new knowledge from databases. During the recent years, several variations on the Self Organizing Maps (SOM) were introduced in the literature. In this paper, the toroidal Emergent SOM tool and the spherical SOM are used to analyze a text corpus consisting of police reports of all violent incidents that occurred during the first quarter of 2006 in the police region Amsterdam-Amstelland (The Netherlands). It is demonstrated that spherical topographic maps provide a powerful instrument for analyzing this dataset. In addition, the performance of the toroidal Emergent SOM is compared to that of the spherical SOM, and it turned out to be superior to that of an ordinary classifier, applied directly to the data.Topographic maps; Domestic violence; Knowledge discovery in databases; Emergent SOM; BLOSSOM;

Sentence context prevails over word association in aphasia patients with spared comprehension : evidence from N400 event-related potential

Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) studies on aphasia patients showed that lexical information is not lost but rather its integration into the working context is hampered. Studies have been conducted on the processing of sentence-level information (meaningful versus meaningless) and of word-level information (related versus unrelated) in aphasia patients, but we are not aware of any study that assesses the relationship between the two. In healthy subjects the processing of a single word in a sentence context has been studied using the N400 ERP. It was shown that, even when there is only a weak expectation of a final word in a sentence, this expectation will dominate word relatedness. In order to study the effect of semantic relatedness between words in sentence processing in aphasia patients, we conducted a crossed design ERP study, crossing the factors of word relatedness and sentence congruity. We tested aphasia patients with mild to minimum comprehension deficit and healthy young and older (age-matched with our patients) controls on a semantic anomaly judgment task when simultaneously recording EEG. Our results show that our aphasia patient's N400 amplitudes in response to the sentences of our crossed-design study were similar to those of our age-matched healthy subjects. However, we detected an increase in the N400 ERP latency in those patients, indicating a delay in the integration of the new word into the working context. Additionally, we observed a positive correlation between comprehension level of those patients and N400 effect in response to meaningful sentences without word relatedness contrasted to meaningless sentences without word relatedness

Fixed point rules for heteroscedastic Gaussian kernel-based topographic map formation

We develop a number of fixed point rules for training homogeneous, heteroscedastic but otherwise radially-symmetric Gaussian kernel-based topographic maps. We extend the batch map algorithm to the heteroscedastic case and introduce two candidates of fixed point rules for which the end-states, i.e., after the neighborhood range has vanished, are identical to the maximum likelihood Gaussian mixture modeling case. We compare their performance for clustering a number of real world data sets

Fixed point rules for heteroscedastic Gaussian kernel-based topographic map formation

We develop a number of fixed point rules for training homogeneous, heteroscedastic but otherwise radially-symmetric Gaussian kernel-based topographic maps. We extend the batch map algorithm to the heteroscedastic case and introduce two candidates of fixed point rules for which the end-states, i.e., after the neighborhood range has vanished, are identical to the maximum likelihood Gaussian mixture modeling case. We compare their performance for clustering a number of real world data sets

Comonotoniciteit als risk management instrument.

Risk; Risk management; Management;

TB165: Chemical and Physical Properties of the Danforth, Elliotsville, Peacham, and Penquis Soil Map Units

The soils reported in this bulletin have developed in several different parent materials. The Danforth soil has developed from very deep, well drained, loose, high coarse fragment till derived from slate and fine-grained metasandstone. The Elliottsville soils have developed in moderately deep, well drained till derived from slates, metasandstones, phyllite and schists. The Penquis soils developed in moderately deep, well drained till of similar lithology as Elliottsville, but with a higher component of weathered and crushable rock fragments throughout the soil profile. Peacham soils are developed in very deep, very poorly drained, dense till derived from phyllite, schist, and granite.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_techbulletin/1041/thumbnail.jp

High-gamma oscillations precede visual steady-state responses : a human electrocorticography study

The robust steady-state cortical activation elicited by flickering visual stimulation has been exploited by a wide range of scientific studies. As the fundamental neural response inherits the spectral properties of the gazed flickering, the paradigm has been used to chart cortical characteristics and their relation to pathologies. However, despite its widespread adoption, the underlying neural mechanisms are not well understood. Here, we show that the fundamental response is preceded by high-gamma (55-125 Hz) oscillations which are also synchronised to the gazed frequency. Using a subdural recording of the primary and associative visual cortices of one human subject, we demonstrate that the latencies of the high-gamma and fundamental components are highly correlated on a single-trial basis albeit that the latter is consistently delayed by approximately 55 ms. These results corroborate previous reports that top-down feedback projections are involved in the generation of the fundamental response, but, in addition, we show that trial-to-trial variability in fundamental latency is paralleled by a highly similar variability in high-gamma latency. Pathology- or paradigm-induced alterations in steady-state responses could thus originate either from deviating visual gamma responses or from aberrations in the neural feedback mechanism. Experiments designed to tease apart the two processes are expected to provide deeper insights into the studied paradigm

Language Model Applications to Spelling with Brain-Computer Interfaces

Within the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) community, Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have raised great hopes as they provide alternative communication means for persons with disabilities bypassing the need for speech and other motor activities. Although significant advancements have been realized in the last decade, applications of language models (e.g., word prediction, completion) have only recently started to appear in BCI systems. The main goal of this article is to review the language model applications that supplement non-invasive BCI-based communication systems by discussing their potential and limitations, and to discern future trends. First, a brief overview of the most prominent BCI spelling systems is given, followed by an in-depth discussion of the language models appli