The Computational Magic of the Ventral Stream: Towards a Theory

I conjecture that the sample complexity of object recognition is mostly due to geometric image transformations and that a main goal of the ventral stream – V1, V2, V4 and IT – is to learn-and-discount image transformations. The most surprising implication of the theory emerging from these assumptions is that the computational goals and detailed properties of cells in the ventral stream follow from symmetry properties of the visual world through a process of unsupervised correlational learning.

From the assumption of a hierarchy of areas with receptive fields of increasing size the theory predicts that the size of the receptive fields determines which transformations are learned during development and then factored out during normal processing; that the transformation represented in each area determines the tuning of the neurons in the aerea, independently of the statistics of natural images; and that class-specific transformations are learned and represented at the top of the ventral stream hierarchy.

Some of the main predictions of this theory-in-fieri are:
1. the type of transformation that are learned from visual experience depend on the size (measured in terms of wavelength) and thus on the area (layer in the models) – assuming that the aperture size increases with layers;
2. the mix of transformations learned determine the properties of the receptive fields – oriented bars in V1+V2, radial and spiral patterns in V4 up to class specific tuning in AIT (eg face tuned cells);
3. invariance to small translations in V1 may underly stability of visual perception
4. class-specific modules – such as faces, places and possibly body areas – should exist in IT to process images of object classes

Reconciling Techno-simplicity and Eco-complexity for future food security

Ecological intensification has been proposed as a paradigm for ensuring global food security while preserving biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. Ecologicalintensification was originally coined to promote precise site-specific farming practices aimed at reducing yield gaps, while avoiding negative environmental impacts (techno-simplicity). Recently, it has been extended to stress the importance of landscape complexity to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem services (eco-complexity). While these perspectives on ecological intensification may seem distinct, they are not incompatible and should be interwoven to create more comprehensive and practical solutions. Here, we argue that designing cropping systems to be more diverse, across space and time would be an effective route to accomplish environmentally-friendly intensification of crop production. Such a novel approach will require better integration of knowledge at the landscape level for increasing agro-biodiversity(focused on interventions outside fields) with strategies diversifying croppingsystems to manage weeds and pests (focused on interventions inside fields).Fil: Poggio, Santiago Luis. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisiológicas y Ecológicas Vinculadas a la Agricultura. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomía. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisiológicas y Ecológicas Vinculadas a la Agricultura; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Agronomía. Departamento de Producción Vegetal. Cátedra de Producción Vegetal; ArgentinaFil: Macfadyen, Sarina. CSIRO; AustraliaFil: Bohan, David A.. Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique; Franci

Fathers' Stories of Resistance and Hegemony in Organizational Cultures

This article focuses on the practices of resistance and hegemony that oppose change in gender cultures in organizations. It suggests that analysis of the narratives produced by organizational actors is a fruitful method with which to deal with issues of this kind. In particular, the analysis concentrates on how resistance and hegemony practices may affect the implementation of changes promoted at a normative level — as in the case of the Italian law that has extended the right to take parental leave for childcare to men as well, in opposition to the dominant cultural models of gender. The analysis of the experiences reported by men belonging to different organizations, and having in common the use of parental leave to spend time with their children, allows us to reflect upon the fact that the symbolic orders of gender in organizations cannot be challenged at a normative level if the change does not affect the organizational culture, becoming embedded in everyday organizational practices

Gender and Precarious Research Careers : A Comparative Analysis

The literature on gender and science shows that scientific careers continue to be characterised \u2013 albeit with important differences among countries \u2013 by strong gender discriminations, especially in more prestigious positions. Much less investigated is the issue of which stage in the career such differences begin to show up. Gender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education and its gendered effects, and springs from a three-year research project across institutions in seven European countries: Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland, Switzerland, Slovenia and Austria. Examining gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations, this insightful volume focuses particularly on early careers. It centres both on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and SSH (Social Science and Humanities) fields. Offering recommendations to design innovative organisational policies and self-tailored \u2018Gender Equality Plans\u2019 to be implemented in universities and research centres, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Sociology of Work and Industry, Sociology of Knowledge, Business Studies and Higher Education

Neural Tuning Size in a Model of Primate Visual Processing Accounts for Three Key Markers of Holistic Face Processing

Faces are an important and unique class of visual stimuli, and have been of interest to neuroscientists for many years. Faces are known to elicit certain characteristic behavioral markers, collectively labeled “holistic processing”, while non-face objects are not processed holistically. However, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. The main aim of this computational simulation work is to investigate the neural mechanisms that make face processing holistic. Using a model of primate visual processing, we show that a single key factor, “neural tuning size”, is able to account for three important markers of holistic face processing: the Composite Face Effect (CFE), Face Inversion Effect (FIE) and Whole-Part Effect (WPE). Our proof-of-principle specifies the precise neurophysiological property that corresponds to the poorly-understood notion of holism, and shows that this one neural property controls three classic behavioral markers of holism. Our work is consistent with neurophysiological evidence, and makes further testable predictions. Overall, we provide a parsimonious account of holistic face processing, connecting computation, behavior and neurophysiology.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (STC award CCF-1231216

Mouse Behavior Recognition with The Wisdom of Crowd

In this thesis, we designed and implemented a crowdsourcing system to annotatemouse behaviors in videos; this involves the development of a novel clip-based video labeling tools, that is more efficient than traditional labeling tools in crowdsourcing platform, as well as the design of probabilistic inference algorithms that predict the true labels and the workers' expertise from multiple workers' responses. Our algorithms are shown to perform better than majority vote heuristic. We also carried out extensive experiments to determine the effectiveness of our labeling tool, inference algorithms and the overall system