Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are distributed systems whose computing elements, or neurons, are characterized by analog internal dynamics and by digital and sparse inter-neuron, or synaptic, communications. The sparsity of the synaptic spiking inputs and the corresponding event-driven nature of neural processing can be leveraged by hardware implementations to obtain significant energy reductions as compared to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). SNNs can be used not only as coprocessors tocarry out given computing tasks, such as classification, but also as learning machines that adapt their internal parameters, e.g., their synaptic weights, on the basis of data and of a learning criterion. This paper provides an overview of models, learning rules, and applications of SNNs from the viewpoint of stochastic signal processing. INTRODUCTION Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have become the de-facto standard tool to carry out supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning tasks. Their recent successes range from image classifiers that outperform human experts in medical diagnosis to machines that defeat professional players at complex games such as Go.

In this paper, we propose a new method of Bayesian measurement for spectral deconvolution, which regresses spectral data into the sum of unimodal basis function such as Gaussian or Lorentzian functions. Bayesian measurement is a framework for considering not only the target physical model but also the measurement model as a probabilistic model, and enables us to estimate the parameter of a physical model with its confidence interval through a Bayesian posterior distribution given a measurement data set. The measurement with Poisson noise is one of the most effective system to apply our proposed method. Since the measurement time is strongly related to the signal-to-noise ratio for the Poisson noise model, Bayesian measurement with Poisson noise model enables us to clarify the relationship between the measurement time and the limit of estimation. In this study, we establish the probabilistic model with Poisson noise for spectral deconvolution. Bayesian measurement enables us to perform virtual and computer simulation for a certain measurement through the established probabilistic model. This property is called "Virtual Measurement Analytics(VMA)" in this paper. We also show that the relationship between the measurement time and the limit of estimation can be extracted by using the proposed method in a simulation of synthetic data and real data for XPS measurement of MoS$_2$.

The burgeoning need for kidney transplantation mandates immediate attention. Mismatch of deceased donor-recipient kidney leads to post-transplant death. To ensure ideal kidney donor-recipient match and minimize post-transplant deaths, the paper develops a prediction model that identifies factors that determine the probability of success of renal transplantation, that is, if the kidney procured from the deceased donor can be transplanted or discarded. The paper conducts a study enveloping data for 584 imported kidneys collected from 12 transplant centers associated with an organ procurement organization located in New York City, NY. The predicting model yielding best performance measures can be beneficial to the healthcare industry. Transplant centers and organ procurement organizations can take advantage of the prediction model to efficiently predict the outcome of kidney transplantation. Consequently, it will reduce the mortality rate caused by mismatching of donor-recipient kidney transplantation during the surgery.

Finding the most probable explanation for observed variables in a Bayesian network is a notoriously intractable problem, particularly if there are hidden variables in the network. In this paper we examine the complexity of a related problem, that is, the problem of finding a set of sufficiently dissimilar, yet all plausible, explanations. Applications of this problem are, e.g., in search query results (you won't want 10 results that all link to the same website) or in decision support systems. We show that the problem of finding a 'good enough' explanation that differs in structure from the best explanation is at least as hard as finding the best explanation itself.

Phylogeny is the field of modelling the temporal discrete dynamics of speciation. Complex models can nowadays be studied using the Approximate Bayesian Computation approach which avoids likelihood calculations. The field's progression is hampered by the lack of robust software to estimate the numerous parameters of the speciation process. In this work we present an R package, pcmabc, based on Approximate Bayesian Computations, that implements three novel phylogenetic algorithms for trait-dependent speciation modelling. Our phylogenetic comparative methodology takes into account both the simulated traits and phylogeny, attempting to estimate the parameters of the processes generating the phenotype and the trait. The user is not restricted to a predefined set of models and can specify a variety of evolutionary and branching models. We illustrate the software with a simulation-reestimation study focused around the branching Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, where the branching rate depends non-linearly on the value of the driving Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. Included in this work is a tutorial on how to use the software.

Robots are increasingly used to carry out critical missions in extreme environments that are hazardous for humans. This requires a high degree of operational autonomy under uncertain conditions, and poses new challenges for assuring the robot's safety and reliability. In this paper, we develop a framework for probabilistic model checking on a layered Markov model to verify the safety and reliability requirements of such robots, both at pre-mission stage and during runtime. Two novel estimators based on conservative Bayesian inference and imprecise probability model with sets of priors are introduced to learn the unknown transition parameters from operational data. We demonstrate our approach using data from a real-world deployment of unmanned underwater vehicles in extreme environments.

Tasks such as social network analysis, human behavior recognition, or modeling biochemical reactions, can be solved elegantly by using the probabilistic inference framework. However, standard probabilistic inference algorithms work at a propositional level, and thus cannot capture the symmetries and redundancies that are present in these tasks. Algorithms that exploit those symmetries have been devised in different research fields, for example by the lifted inference-, multiple object tracking-, and modeling and simulation-communities. The common idea, that we call state space abstraction, is to perform inference over compact representations of sets of symmetric states. Although they are concerned with a similar topic, the relationship between these approaches has not been investigated systematically. This survey provides the following contributions. We perform a systematic literature review to outline the state of the art in probabilistic inference methods exploiting symmetries. From an initial set of more than 4,000 papers, we identify 116 relevant papers. Furthermore, we provide new high-level categories that classify the approaches, based on common properties of the approaches. The research areas underlying each of the categories are introduced concisely. Researchers from different fields that are confronted with a state space explosion problem in a probabilistic system can use this classification to identify possible solutions. Finally, based on this conceptualization, we identify potentials for future research, as some relevant application domains are not addressed by current approaches.

We derive the fast convergence rates of a deep neural network (DNN) classifier with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function learned using the hinge loss. We consider three cases for a true model: (1) a smooth decision boundary, (2) smooth conditional class probability, and (3) the margin condition (i.e., the probability of inputs near the decision boundary is small). We show that the DNN classifier learned using the hinge loss achieves fast rate convergences for all three cases provided that the architecture (i.e., the number of layers, number of nodes and sparsity). is carefully selected. An important implication is that DNN architectures are very flexible for use in various cases without much modification. In addition, we consider a DNN classifier learned by minimizing the cross-entropy, and show that the DNN classifier achieves a fast convergence rate under the condition that the conditional class probabilities of most data are sufficiently close to either 1 or zero. This assumption is not unusual for image recognition because human beings are extremely good at recognizing most images. To confirm our theoretical explanation, we present the results of a small numerical study conducted to compare the hinge loss and cross-entropy.

Faces play a magnificent role in human robot interaction, as they do in our daily life. The inherent ability of the human mind facilitates us to recognize a person by exploiting various challenges such as bad illumination, occlusions, pose variation etc. which are involved in face recognition. But it is a very complex task in nature to identify a human face by humanoid robots. The recent literatures on face biometric recognition are extremely rich in its application on structured environment for solving human identification problem. But the application of face biometric on mobile robotics is limited for its inability to produce accurate identification in uneven circumstances. The existing face recognition problem has been tackled with our proposed component based fragmented face recognition framework. The proposed framework uses only a subset of the full face such as eyes, nose and mouth to recognize a person. It's less searching cost, encouraging accuracy and ability to handle various challenges of face recognition offers its applicability on humanoid robots. The second problem in face recognition is the face spoofing, in which a face recognition system is not able to distinguish between a person and an imposter (photo/video of the genuine user). The problem will become more detrimental when robots are used as an authenticator. A depth analysis method has been investigated in our research work to test the liveness of imposters to discriminate them from the legitimate users. The implication of the previous earned techniques has been used with respect to criminal identification with NAO robot. An eyewitness can interact with NAO through a user interface. NAO asks several questions about the suspect, such as age, height, her/his facial shape and size etc., and then making a guess about her/his face.

Deep neural networks(NNs) have achieved impressive performance, often exceed human performance on many computer vision tasks. However, one of the most challenging issues that still remains is that NNs are overconfident in their predictions, which can be very harmful when this arises in safety critical applications. In this paper, we show that predictive uncertainty can be efficiently estimated when we incorporate the concept of gradients uncertainty into posterior sampling. The proposed method is tested on two different datasets, MNIST for in-distribution confusing examples and notMNIST for out-of-distribution data. We show that our method is able to efficiently represent predictive uncertainty on both datasets.