A one dimensional model of primate smooth pursuit mechanism has been implemented in 2 11m CMOS VLSI. The model consolidates Robinson's negative feedback model with Wyatt and Pola's positive feedback scheme, to produce a smooth pursuit system which zero's the velocity of a target on the retina. Furthermore, the system uses the current eye motion as a predictor for future target motion. Analysis, stability and biological correspondence of the system are discussed. For implementation at the focal plane, a local correlation based visual motion detection technique is used. Velocity measurements, ranging over 4 orders of magnitude with 15% variation, provides the input to the smooth pursuit system. The system performed successful velocity tracking for high contrast scenes. Circuit design and performance of the complete smooth pursuit system is presented.

Visual cognition depends criticalIy on the ability to make rapid eye movements known as saccades that orient the fovea over targets of interest in a visual scene. Saccades are known to be ballistic: the pattern of muscle activation for foveating a prespecified target location is computed prior to the movement and visual feedback is precluded. Despite these distinctive properties, there has been no general model of the saccadic targeting strategy employed by the human visual system during visual search in natural scenes. This paper proposes a model for saccadic targeting that uses iconic scene representations derived from oriented spatial filters at multiple scales. Visual search proceeds in a coarse-to-fine fashion with the largest scale filter responses being compared first. The model was empirically tested by comparing its perfonnance with actual eye movement data from human subjects in a natural visual search task; preliminary results indicate substantial agreement between eye movements predicted by the model and those recorded from human subjects.

Recent experiments show that the neural codes at work in a wide range of creatures share some common features. At first sight, these observations seem unrelated. However, we show that these features arise naturally in a linear filtered threshold crossing (LFTC) model when we set the threshold to maximize the transmitted information. This maximization process requires neural adaptation to not only the DC signal level, as in conventional light and dark adaptation, but also to the statistical structure of the signal and noise distributions. We also present a new approach for calculating the mutual information between a neuron's output spike train and any aspect of its input signal which does not require reconstruction of the input signal. This formulation is valid provided the correlations in the spike train are small, and we provide a procedure for checking this assumption. This paper is based on joint work (DeWeese [1], 1995). Preliminary results from the LFTC model appeared in a previous proceedings (DeWeese [2], 1995), and the conclusions we reached at that time have been reaffirmed by further analysis of the model.

This paper discusses the use of multilayer feed forward neural networks for predicting a stock's excess return based on its exposure to various technical and fundamental factors. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach a hedged portfolio which consists of equally capitalized long and short positions is constructed and its historical returns are benchmarked against T-bill returns and the S&P500 index. 1 Introduction

"Topographic" mappings occur frequently in the brain. A popular approach to understanding the structure of such mappings is to map points representing input features in a space of a few dimensions to points in a 2 dimensional space using some selforganizing algorithm. We argue that a more general approach may be useful, where similarities between features are not constrained to be geometric distances, and the objective function for topographic matching is chosen explicitly rather than being specified implicitly by the self-organizing algorithm. We investigate analytically an example of this more general approach applied to the structure of interdigitated mappings, such as the pattern of ocular dominance columns in primary visual cortex. 1 INTRODUCTION A prevalent feature of mappings in the brain is that they are often "topographic". In the most straightforward case this simply means that neighbouring points on a two-dimensional sheet (e.g. the retina) are mapped to neighbouring points in a more central two-dimensional structure (e.g. the optic tectum). However a more complex case, still often referred to as topographic, is the mapping from an abstract space of features (e.g.

We report on our development of a high-performance system for neural network and other signal processing applications. We have designed and implemented a vector microprocessor and packaged it as an attached processor for a conventional workstation.

We have developed a computational theory of rodent navigation that includes analogs of the place cell system, the head direction system, and path integration. In this paper we present simulation results showing how interactions between the place and head direction systems can account for recent observations about hippocampal place cell responses to doubling and/or rotation of cue cards in a cylindrical arena (Sharp et at.,

We have recently developed a theory of spatial representations in which the position of an object is not encoded in a particular frame of reference but, instead, involves neurons computing basis functions of their sensory inputs. This type of representation is able to perform nonlinear sensorimotor transformations and is consistent with the response properties of parietal neurons. We now ask whether the same theory could account for the behavior of human patients with parietal lesions. These lesions induce a deficit known as hemineglect that is characterized by a lack of reaction to stimuli located in the hemispace contralateral to the lesion. A simulated lesion in a basis function representation was found to replicate three of the most important aspects of hemineglect: i) The models failed to cross the leftmost lines in line cancellation experiments, ii) the deficit affected multiple frames of reference and, iii) it could be object centered. These results strongly support the basis function hypothesis for spatial representations and provide a computational theory of hemineglect at the single cell level. 1 Introduction According to current theories of spatial representations, the positions of objects are represented in multiple modules throughout the brain, each module being specialized for a particular sensorimotor transformation and using its own frame of reference. For instance, the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) appears to encode the location of objects in oculocentric coordinates, presumably for the control of saccadic eye movements.

We introduce a new algorithm designed to learn sparse perceptrons over input representations which include high-order features. Our algorithm, which is based on a hypothesis-boosting method, is able to PAClearn a relatively natural class of target concepts. Moreover, the algorithm appears to work well in practice: on a set of three problem domains, the algorithm produces classifiers that utilize small numbers of features yet exhibit good generalization performance. Perhaps most importantly, our algorithm generates concept descriptions that are easy for humans to understand. However, in many applications, such as those that may involve scientific discovery, it is crucial to be able to explain predictions.

This paper describes the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to the difficult real world problem of elevator dispatching. The elevator domain poses a combination of challenges not seen in most RL research to date. Elevator systems operate in continuous state spaces and in continuous time as discrete event dynamic systems. Their states are not fully observable and they are nonstationary due to changing passenger arrival rates. In addition, we use a team of RL agents, each of which is responsible for controlling one elevator car.