Recently, Ott, Grebogi and Yorke (OGY) [6] found an effective method to control chaotic systems to unstable fixed points by using only small control forces; however, OGY's method is based on and limited to a linear theory and requires considerable knowledge of the dynamics of the system to be controlled. In this paper we use two radial basis function networks: one as a model of an unknown plant and the other as the controller. The controller is trained with a recurrent learning algorithm to minimize a novel objective function such that the controller can locate an unstable fixed point and drive the system into the fixed point with no a priori knowledge of the system dynamics. Our results indicate that the neural controller offers many advantages over OGY's technique.

We developed a system for finding address blocks on mail pieces that can process four images per second. Besides locating the address block, our system also determines the writing style, handwritten or machine printed, and moreover, it measures the skew angle of the text lines and cleans noisy images. A layout analysis of all the elements present in the image is performed in order to distinguish drawings and dirt from text and to separate text of advertisement from that of the destination address. A speed of more than four images per second is obtained on a modular hardware platform, containing a board with two of the NET32K neural net chips, a SP ARC2 processor board, and a board with 2 digital signal processors. The system has been tested with more than 100,000 images. Its performance depends on the quality of the images, and lies between 85% correct location in very noisy images to over 98% in cleaner images.

This study explores the extent to which a network that learns the temporal relationships within and between the component features of Western tonal music can account for music theoretic and psychological phenomena such as the tonal hierarchy and rhythmic expectancies. Predicted and generated sequences were recorded as the representation of a 153-note waltz melody was learnt by a predictive, recurrent network. The network learned transitions and relations between and within pitch and timing components: accent and duration values interacted in the development of rhythmic and metric structures and, with training, the network developed chordal expectancies in response to the activation of individual tones. Analysis of the hidden unit representation revealed that musical sequences are represented as transitions between states in hidden unit space.

The task of drug activity prediction is to predict the activity of proposed drug compounds by learning from the observed activity of previously-synthesized drug compounds. Accurate drug activity prediction can save substantial time and money by focusing the efforts of chemists and biologists on the synthesis and testing of compounds whose predicted activity is high. If the requirements for highly active binding can be displayed in three dimensions, chemists can work from such displays to design new compounds having high predicted activity. Drug molecules usually act by binding to localized sites on large receptor molecules or large enyzme molecules. One reasonable way to represent drug molecules is to capture the location of their surface in the (fixed) frame of reference of the (hypothesized) binding site.

While exploring to find better solutions, an agent performing online reinforcement learning (RL) can perform worse than is acceptable. In some cases, exploration might have unsafe, or even catastrophic, results, often modeled in terms of reaching'failure' states of the agent's environment. This paper presents a method that uses domain knowledge to reduce the number of failures during exploration. This method formulates the set of actions from which the RL agent composes a control policy to ensure that exploration is conducted in a policy space that excludes most of the unacceptable policies. The resulting action set has a more abstract relationship to the task being solved than is common in many applications of RL. Although the cost of this added safety is that learning may result in a suboptimal solution, we argue that this is an appropriate tradeoff in many problems. We illustrate this method in the domain of motion planning. "'This work was done while the first author was finishing his Ph.D in computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Consider the problem of learning input/output mappings through exploration, e.g.

Sound localization by the barn owl (tyto alba) measured with the search coil technique.

The purpose of this workshop was to discuss both recent experimental findings and computational models of the neurobiological implementation of selective attention. Recent experimental results were presented in two of the four presentations given (C.E. Connor, Washington University and B.C. Motter, SUNY and V.A. Medical Center, Syracuse), while the other two talks were devoted to computational models (E. Connor presented the results of an experiment in which the receptive field profiles of V 4 neurons were mapped during different states of attention in an awake, behaving monkey. The attentional focus was manipulated in this experiment by altering the position of a behaviorally relevant ring-shaped stimulus.

In an effort to understand saccadic eye movements and their relation to visual attention and other forms of eye movements, we - in collaboration with a number of other laboratories - are carrying out a large-scale effort to design and build a complete primate oculomotor system using analog CMOS VLSI technology. Using this technology, a low power, compact, multi-chip system has been built which works in real-time using real-world visual inputs. We describe in this paper the performance of an early version of such a system including a 1-D array of photoreceptors mimicking the retina, a circuit computing the mean location of activity representing the superior colliculus, a saccadic burst generator, and a one degree-of-freedom rotational platform which models the dynamic properties of the primate oculomotor plant. 1 Introduction When we look around our environment, we move our eyes to center and stabilize objects of interest onto our fovea. In order to achieve this, our eyes move in quick jumps with short pauses in between. These quick jumps (up to 750 deg/sec in humans) are known as saccades and are seen in both exploratory eye movements and as reflexive eye movements in response to sudden visual, auditory, or somatosensory stimuli. Since the intent of the saccade is to bring new objects of interest onto the fovea, it can be considered a primitive attentional mechanism.

Human genes are not continuous but rather consist of short coding regions (exons) interspersed with highly variable non-coding regions (introns). We apply HMMs to the problem of modeling exons, introns and detecting splice sites in the human genome. Our most interesting result so far is the detection of particular oscillatory patterns, with a minimal period ofroughly 10 nucleotides, that seem to be characteristic of exon regions and may have significant biological implications.