Understanding short-timescale neuronal firing sequences via bias matrices

The brain generates persistent neuronal firing sequences across varying timescales. The short-timescale (~100ms) sequences are believed to be crucial in the formation and transfer of memories. Large-amplitude local field potentials known as sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) occur irregularly in hippocampus when an animal has minimal interaction with its environment, such as during resting, immobility, or slow-wave sleep. SWRs have been long hypothesized to play a critical role in transferring memories from the hippocampus to the neocortex [1]. While sequential firing during SWRs is known to be biased by the previous experiences of the animal, the exact relationship of the short-timescale sequences during SWRs and longer-timescale sequences during spatial and nonspatial behaviors is still poorly understood. One hypothesis is that the sequences during SWRs are “replays” or “preplays” of “master sequences”, which are sequences that closely mimic the order of place fields on a linear track [2,3]. Rather than particular hard-coded “master” sequences, an alternative explanation of the observed correlations is that similar sequences arise naturally from the intrinsic biases of firing between pairs of cells. To distinguish these and other possibilities, one needs mathematical tools beyond the center-of-mass sequences and Spearman’s rank-correlation coefficient that are currently used

Impacts of road network expansion on landscape ecological risk in a megacity, China: A case study of Beijing

AbstractRoad networks affect the spatial structure of urban landscapes, and with continuous expansion, it will also exert more widespread influences on the regional ecological environment. With the support of geographic information system (GIS) technology, based on the application of various spatial analysis methods, this study analyzed the spatiotemporal changes of road networks and landscape ecological risk in the research area of Beijing to explore the impacts of road network expansion on ecological risk in the urban landscape. The results showed the following: 1) In the dynamic processes of change in the overall landscape pattern, the changing differences in landscape indices of various landscape types were obvious and were primarily related to land-use type. 2) For the changes in a time series, the expansion of the road kernel area was consistent with the extension of the sub-low-risk area in the urban center, but some differences were observed during different stages of development. 3) For the spatial position, the expanding changes in the road kernel area were consistent with the grade changes of the urban central ecological risk, primarily because both had a certain spatial correlation with the expressways. 4) The influence of road network expansion on the ecological risk in the study area had obvious spatial differences, which may be closely associated with the distribution of ecosystem types

Theta-modulation drives the emergence of connectivity patterns underlying replay in a network model of place cells

Place cells of the rodent hippocampus fire action potentials when the animal traverses a particular spatial location in any environment. Therefore for any given trajectory one observes a repeatable sequence of place cell activations. When the animal is quiescent or sleeping, one can observe similar sequences of activation known as replay, which underlie the process of memory consolidation. However, it remains unclear how replay is generated. Here we show how a temporally asymmetric plasticity rule during spatial exploration gives rise to spontaneous replay in a model network by shaping the recurrent connectivity to reflect the topology of the learned environment. Crucially, the rate of this encoding is strongly modulated by ongoing rhythms. Oscillations in the theta range optimize learning by generating repeated pre-post pairings on a time-scale commensurate with the window for plasticity, while lower and higher frequencies generate learning rates which are lower by orders of magnitude

Theta-modulation drives the emergence of connectivity patterns underlying replay in a network model of place cells

Place cells of the rodent hippocampus fire action potentials when the animal traverses a particular spatial location in any environment. Therefore for any given trajectory one observes a repeatable sequence of place cell activations. When the animal is quiescent or sleeping, one can observe similar sequences of activation known as replay, which underlie the process of memory consolidation. However, it remains unclear how replay is generated. Here we show how a temporally asymmetric plasticity rule during spatial exploration gives rise to spontaneous replay in a model network by shaping the recurrent connectivity to reflect the topology of the learned environment. Crucially, the rate of this encoding is strongly modulated by ongoing rhythms. Oscillations in the theta range optimize learning by generating repeated pre-post pairings on a time-scale commensurate with the window for plasticity, while lower and higher frequencies generate learning rates which are lower by orders of magnitude

Obtaining High Quality SCAL Data: Combining Different Measurement Techniques, Saturation Monitoring, Numerical Interpretation and Continuous Monitoring of Experimental Data

SCAL parameters (i.e., Relative Permeability and Capillary Pressure curves) are key inputs to understand and predict reservoir behavior in all phases of development. Techniques to measure relative permeability and capillary pressure have been well established and applied to a wide variety of core samples both from sandstone and carbonate reservoirs. On the other hand, we frequently encounter quality compromised data due to challenges in experimental procedures, lack of understanding of measurement techniques, and poor quality of raw data. As a result, relative permeability is often viewed as a parameter with large uncertainties and a fitting parameter in history matching. A special core analysis program was recently carried out on selected core samples from a deep-water sandstone reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico. In this frontier, relative permeability has been ranked among the top subsurface uncertainties. It greatly impacts the production forecast and field development plan. However, due to the high temperature, high salinity and fluid compatibility issues, the core measurements faced very specific challenges and a good relative permeability dataset has not been obtained in the past for this area. In this work, we demonstrate that a quality set of relative permeability data can be obtained through close collaboration across disciplines, a properly designed protocol, adequate engagement with the laboratory, timely QA/QC of experimental raw data, and appropriate interpretation incorporating numerical simulations. Well-defined and constrained relative permeability curve shave been derived with the combination of steady state and centrifuge techniques. The average trend can be described by a residual oil saturation of 22%, end-point relative permeabilities of 0.6 and 0.2 to oil and water, respectively and Corey exponents between 2 and 3

Reimagining City Configuration: Automated Urban Planning via Adversarial Learning

Urban planning refers to the efforts of designing land-use configurations. Effective urban planning can help to mitigate the operational and social vulnerability of a urban system, such as high tax, crimes, traffic congestion and accidents, pollution, depression, and anxiety. Due to the high complexity of urban systems, such tasks are mostly completed by professional planners. But, human planners take longer time. The recent advance of deep learning motivates us to ask: can machines learn at a human capability to automatically and quickly calculate land-use configuration, so human planners can finally adjust machine-generated plans for specific needs? To this end, we formulate the automated urban planning problem into a task of learning to configure land-uses, given the surrounding spatial contexts. To set up the task, we define a land-use configuration as a longitude-latitude-channel tensor, where each channel is a category of POIs and the value of an entry is the number of POIs. The objective is then to propose an adversarial learning framework that can automatically generate such tensor for an unplanned area. In particular, we first characterize the contexts of surrounding areas of an unplanned area by learning representations from spatial graphs using geographic and human mobility data. Second, we combine each unplanned area and its surrounding context representation as a tuple, and categorize all the tuples into positive (well-planned areas) and negative samples (poorly-planned areas). Third, we develop an adversarial land-use configuration approach, where the surrounding context representation is fed into a generator to generate a land-use configuration, and a discriminator learns to distinguish among positive and negative samples.Comment: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (2020

High-Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Applied to the Parietal Cortex for Low-Functioning Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Series

Background: Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a safe and efficacious technique to stimulate specific areas of cortical dysfunction in several neuropsychiatric diseases; however, it is not known whether high-frequency rTMS (HF-rTMS) over the left inferior parietal lobule, in low functioning children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), improves core symptoms.Method: Eleven low-functioning children with ASD completed two separate HF-rTMS treatment courses, 6 weeks apart. Each treatment course involved five 5-s trains at 20 Hz, with 10-min inter-train intervals, on left inferior parietal lobule each consecutive weekday for a 3-week period (15 treatments per course). Subjects were assessed at five time points: immediately before and after the first HF-rTMS course, immediately before and after the second HF-rTMS course, and 6 weeks after the second rTMS treatment course. Treatment effectiveness was evaluated using the Verbal Behavior Assessment Scale (VerBAS) and Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC). The latter test consists of four subtest scales: Language, Sociability, Sensory, and Behavior. In addition, daily treatment logbooks completed by parents were considered as one of the outcome measures.Results: Participants showed a significant reduction in language- and social-related symptoms measured by ATEC from pretreatment to the 6-week follow-up after the second treatment course. Moreover, some possible improvements in imitation and cognition were reported by caregivers.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that HF-rTMS over the left parietal cortex might improve core deficits in low-functioning children with ASD

Structure Aware Incremental Learning with Personalized Imitation Weights for Recommender Systems

Recommender systems now consume large-scale data and play a significant role in improving user experience. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as one of the most effective recommender system models because they model the rich relational information. The ever-growing volume of data can make training GNNs prohibitively expensive. To address this, previous attempts propose to train the GNN models incrementally as new data blocks arrive. Feature and structure knowledge distillation techniques have been explored to allow the GNN model to train in a fast incremental fashion while alleviating the catastrophic forgetting problem. However, preserving the same amount of the historical information for all users is sub-optimal since it fails to take into account the dynamics of each user's change of preferences. For the users whose interests shift substantially, retaining too much of the old knowledge can overly constrain the model, preventing it from quickly adapting to the users' novel interests. In contrast, for users who have static preferences, model performance can benefit greatly from preserving as much of the user's long-term preferences as possible. In this work, we propose a novel training strategy that adaptively learns personalized imitation weights for each user to balance the contribution from the recent data and the amount of knowledge to be distilled from previous time periods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of learning imitation weights via a comparison on five diverse datasets for three state-of-art structure distillation based recommender systems. The performance shows consistent improvement over competitive incremental learning techninques

Drag reduction using biomimetic sharkskin denticles

This paper explores the use of sharkskin in improving the aerodynamic performance of aerofoils. A biomimetic analysis of the sharkskin denticles was conducted and the denticles were incorporated on the surface of a 2-Dimensional (2D) NACA0012 aerofoil. The aerodynamic performance including the drag reduction rate, lift enhancement rate, and Lift to Drag (L/D) enhancement rate for sharkskin denticles were calculated at different locations along the chord line of the aerofoil and at different Angles of Attack (AOAs) through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Two different denticle orientations were tested. Conditional results indicate that the denticle reduces drag by 4.3% and attains an L/D enhancement ratio of 3.6%