While classical experiments on spike-timing dependent plasticity analyzed synaptic changes as a function of the timing of pairs of pre-and postsynaptic spikes, more recent experiments also point to the effect of spike triplets. Here we develop a mathematical framework that allows us to characterize timing based learning rules. Moreover, we identify a candidate learning rule with five variables (and 5 free parameters) that captures a variety of experimental data, including the dependence of potentiation and depression upon pre-and postsynaptic firing frequencies. The relation to the Bienenstock-Cooper-Munro rule as well as to some timing-based rules is discussed.

Humans make optimal perceptual decisions in noisy and ambiguous conditions. Computations underlying such optimal behavior have been shown to rely on probabilistic inference according to generative models whose structure is usually taken to be known a priori. We argue that Bayesian model selection is ideal for inferring similar and even more complex model structures from experience. We find in experiments that humans learn subtle statistical properties of visual scenes in a completely unsupervised manner. We show that these findings are well captured by Bayesian model learning within a class of models that seek to explain observed variables by independent hidden causes.

When trying to understand the brain, it is of fundamental importance to analyse (e.g. from EEG/MEG measurements) what parts of the cortex interact with each other in order to infer more accurate models of brain activity. Common techniques like Blind Source Separation (BSS) can estimate brain sources and single out artifacts by using the underlying assumption of source signal independence. However, physiologically interesting brain sources typically interact, so BSS will--by construction-- fail to characterize them properly. Noting that there are truly interacting sources and signals that only seemingly interact due to effects of volume conduction, this work aims to contribute by distinguishing these effects. For this a new BSS technique is proposed that uses anti-symmetrized cross-correlation matrices and subsequent diagonalization. The resulting decomposition consists of the truly interacting brain sources and suppresses any spurious interaction stemming from volume conduction. Our new concept of interacting source analysis (ISA) is successfully demonstrated on MEG data.

Reinforcement learning models have long promised to unify computational, psychological and neural accounts of appetitively conditioned behavior. However, the bulk of data on animal conditioning comes from free-operant experiments measuring how fast animals will work for reinforcement. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) models are silent about these tasks, because they lack any notion of vigor. They thus fail to address the simple observation that hungrier animals will work harder for food, as well as stranger facts such as their sometimes greater productivity even when working for irrelevant outcomes such as water. Here, we develop an RL framework for free-operant behavior, suggesting that subjects choose how vigorously to perform selected actions by optimally balancing the costs and benefits of quick responding.

We propose a new Bayesian method for spatial cluster detection, the "Bayesian spatial scan statistic," and compare this method to the standard (frequentist) scan statistic approach. We demonstrate that the Bayesian statistic has several advantages over the frequentist approach, including increased power to detect clusters and (since randomization testing is unnecessary) much faster runtime. We evaluate the Bayesian and frequentist methods on the task of prospective disease surveillance: detecting spatial clusters of disease cases resulting from emerging disease outbreaks. We demonstrate that our Bayesian methods are successful in rapidly detecting outbreaks while keeping number of false positives low.

We present a nonlinear, simple, yet effective, feature subset selection method for regression and use it in analyzing cortical neural activity. Our algorithm involves a feature-weighted version of the k-nearest-neighbor algorithm. It is able to capture complex dependency of the target function on its input and makes use of the leave-one-out error as a natural regularization. We explain the characteristics of our algorithm on synthetic problems and use it in the context of predicting hand velocity from spikes recorded in motor cortex of a behaving monkey. By applying feature selection we are able to improve prediction quality and suggest a novel way of exploring neural data.

An analog focal-plane processor having a 128 128 photodiode array has been developed for directional edge filtering. It can perform 4 4-pixel kernel convolution for entire pixels only with 256 steps of simple analog processing. Newly developed cyclic line access and row-parallel processing scheme in conjunction with the "only-nearest-neighbor interconnects" architecture has enabled a very simple implementation. A proof-of-conceptchip was fabricated in a 0.35-m 2-poly 3-metal CMOS technology and the edge filtering at a rate of 200 frames/sec.

In this paper we propose a new receiver for digital communications. We focus on the application of Gaussian Processes (GPs) to the multiuser detection (MUD) in code division multiple access (CDMA) systems to solve the near-far problem. Hence, we aim to reduce the interference from other users sharing the same frequency band. While usual approaches minimize the mean square error (MMSE) to linearly retrieve the user of interest, we exploit the same criteria but in the design of a nonlinear MUD. Since the optimal solution is known to be nonlinear, the performance of this novel method clearly improves that of the MMSE detectors. Furthermore, the GP based MUD achieves excellent interference suppression even for short training sequences. We also include some experiments to illustrate that other nonlinear detectors such as those based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs) exhibit a worse performance.

Long-distance language modeling is important not only in speech recognition and machine translation, but also in high-dimensional discrete sequence modeling in general. However, the problem of context length has almost been neglected so far and a naïve bag-of-words history has been employed in natural language processing. In contrast, in this paper we view topic shifts within a text as a latent stochastic process to give an explicit probabilistic generative model that has partial exchangeability. We propose an online inference algorithm using particle filters to recognize topic shifts to employ the most appropriate length of context automatically. Experiments on the BNC corpus showed consistent improvement over previous methods involving no chronological order.

There is a longstanding controversy on the site of the cerebellar motor learning. Different theories and experimental results suggest that either the cerebellar flocculus or the brainstem learns the task and stores the memory. With a dynamical system approach, we clarify the mechanism of transferring the memory generated in the flocculus to the brainstem and that of so-called savings phenomena. The brainstem learning must comply with a sort of Hebbian rule depending on Purkinje-cell activities. In contrast to earlier numerical models, our model is simple but it accommodates explanations and predictions of experimental situations as qualitative features of trajectories in the phase space of synaptic weights, without fine parameter tuning.