An application of laterally interconnected self-organizing maps (LISSOM) to handwritten digit recognition is presented. The resulting excitatory connections focus the activity into local patches and the inhibitory connections decorrelate redundant activityon the map. The map thus forms internal representations thatare easy to recognize with e.g. a perceptron network. The recognition rate on a subset of NIST database 3 is 4.0% higher with LISSOM than with a regular Self-Organizing Map (SOM) as the front end, and 15.8% higher than recognition of raw input bitmaps directly. These results form a promising starting point for building pattern recognition systems with a LISSOM map as a front end. 1 Introduction Handwritten digit recognition has become one of the touchstone problems in neural networks recently.

A technique for segmenting sounds using processing based on mammalian earlyauditory processing is presented. The technique is based on features in sound which neuron spike recording suggests are detected in the cochlear nucleus. The sound signal is bandpassed andeach signal processed to enhance onsets and offsets. The onset and offset signals are compressed, then clustered both in time and across frequency channels using a network of integrateand-fire neurons.Onsets and offsets are signalled by spikes, and the timing of these spikes used to segment the sound. 1 Background Traditional speech interpretation techniques based on Fourier transforms, spectrum recoding, and a hidden Markov model or neural network interpretation stage have limitations both in continuous speech and in interpreting speech in the presence of noise, and this has led to interest in front ends modelling biological auditory systems for speech interpretation systems (Ainsworth and Meyer 92; Cosi 93; Cole et al 95). Auditory modelling systems use similar early auditory processing to that used in biological systems.

A hybrid and contextual radial basis function networklhidden Markov model off-line handwritten word recognition system is presented. The task assigned to the radial basis function networks is the estimation of emission probabilities associated to Markov states. The model is contextual becausethe estimation of emission probabilities takes into account the left context of the current image segment as represented by its predecessor inthe sequence. The new system does not outperform the previous system without context but acts differently.

In this setting, each pattern, represented as an n-dimensional feature vector, is associated with a discrete pattern class, or state of nature (Duda and Hart, 1973). Using available information, (e.g., a statistically representative set of labeled feature vectors

The wake-sleep algorithm (Hinton, Dayan, Frey and Neal 1995) is a relatively efficientmethod of fitting a multilayer stochastic generative model to high-dimensional data. In addition to the top-down connections inthe generative model, it makes use of bottom-up connections for approximating the probability distribution over the hidden units given the data, and it trains these bottom-up connections using a simple delta rule. We use a variety of synthetic and real data sets to compare the performance ofthe wake-sleep algorithm with Monte Carlo and mean field methods for fitting the same generative model and also compare it with other models that are less powerful but easier to fit. 1 INTRODUCTION Neural networks are often used as bottom-up recognition devices that transform input vectors intorepresentations of those vectors in one or more hidden layers. But multilayer networks ofstochastic neurons can also be used as top-down generative models that produce patterns with complicated correlational structure in the bottom visible layer. In this paper we consider generative models composed of layers of stochastic binary logistic units. Given a generative model parameterized by top-down weights, there is an obvious way to perform unsupervised learning. The generative weights are adjusted to maximize the probability thatthe visible vectors generated by the model would match the observed data.

This research has been motivated by the dominance of the suboptimal symmetric phase in online learning of two-layer feedforward networks trained by gradient descent [2]. This trapping is emphasized for inappropriate small learning rates but exists in all training scenarios, effecting the learning process considerably. We Adaptive Back-Propagation in Online Learning of Multilayer Networks 329 proposed an adaptive back-propagation training algorithm [Eq.

It has remained unknown whether one can in principle carry out reliable digital computations with networks of biologically realistic models for neurons. This article presents rigorous constructions for simulating in real-time arbitrary given boolean circuits and finite automatawith arbitrarily high reliability by networks of noisy spiking neurons. In addition we show that with the help of "shunting inhibition" even networks of very unreliable spiking neurons can simulate in real-time any McCulloch-Pitts neuron (or "threshold gate"), and therefore any multilayer perceptron (or "threshold circuit") in a reliable manner. These constructions provide a possible explanation forthe fact that biological neural systems can carry out quite complex computations within 100 msec. It turns out that the assumption that these constructions require about the shape of the EPSP's and the behaviour of the noise are surprisingly weak. 1 Introduction

We present results on the use of neural network based autoassociators which act as novelty or anomaly detectors to detect imminent motor failures. The autoassociator is trained to reconstruct spectra obtained from the healthy motor. In laboratory tests, we have demonstrated that the trained autoassociator has a small reconstruction error on measurements recorded from healthy motors but a larger error on those recorded from a motor with a fault. We have designed and built a motor monitoring system using an autoassociator for anomaly detection and are in the process of testing the system at three industrial and commercial sites.

We propose an active learning method with hidden-unit reduction.

Completely parallel object recognition is NPcomplete. Achieving a recognizer with feasible complexity requires a compromise between paralleland sequential processing where a system selectively focuses on parts of a given image, one after another. Successive fixations are generated to sample the image and these samples are processed and abstracted to generate a temporal context in which results are integrated over time. A computational model based on a partially recurrent feedforward network is proposed and made credible bytesting on the real-world problem of recognition of handwritten digitswith encouraging results.