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NEURAL COMPUTATION - November 1, 2014

by Terry Sejnowski

Neural Computation - Contents -- Volume 26, Number 11 - November 1, 2014 Available online for download now: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/neco/26/11 ----- Article High-dimensional Cluster Analysis With the Masked EM Algorithm Shabnam N. Kadir, Dan F.M. Goodman, and Kenneth D. Harris Letters Changes of Firing Rate Induced by Changes of Phase Response Curve in Bifurcation Transitions Yasuomi D. Sato., Kazuyuki Aihara Approximate Emergent Synchrony in Spatially Coupled Spiking Neurons With Discrete Interaction Hans Super, August Romeo Facilitation of Neuronal Responses by Intrinsic Default Mode Network Activity Hiroakira Matsui, Meihong Zheng, and Osamu Hoshino A Hierarchical Adaptive Approach to Optimal Experimental Design Woojae Kim, Mark A. Pitt, Zhong-Lin Lu, Mark Steyvers, and Jay I. Myung Noise Facilitation in Associative Memories of Exponential Capacity Amin Karbasi, Amir Hesam Salavati, Amin Shokrollahi, and Lav R. Varshney A No-go Theorem for One-layer Feedforward Networks Chad D Giusti, Vladimir Itskov Extended Robust Support Vector Machine Based on Financial Risk Minimization Akiko Takeda, Shuhei Fujiwara, and Takafumi Kanamori Nonparametric Estimation of Kullback-Leibler Divergence Zhiyi Zhang, Michael Grabchak Coenzyme Q10 Benefits Symptoms in Gulf War Veterans: Results of a Randomized Double-Blind Pilot Study Beatrice Golomb, Matthew Allison, Sabrina Koperski, Hayley J. Koslik, Sridevi Devaraj, and Janis B Ritchie Visual Motion Priors Differ for Infants and Mothers Florian Raudies, Rick O Gilmore ------------ ON-LINE -- http://www.mitpressjournals.org/neuralcomp SUBSCRIPTIONS - 2014 - VOLUME 26 - 12 ISSUES USA Others Electronic Only Student/Retired $70 $193 $65 Individual $124 $187 $115 Institution $1,035 $1,098 $926 Canada: Add 5% GST MIT Press Journals, 238 Main Street, Suite 500, Cambridge, MA 02142-9902 Tel: (617) 253-2889 FAX: (617) 577-1545 journals-orders(a)mit.edu ------------

Oct. 7, 2014

Open Access Journal with a free publication - Call for papers

by subbotin

Dear Сolleagues, I invite you to send your articles to the journal "Radio Electronics, Computer Science, Control", published by Zaporizhzhya National Technical University (Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine) since 1999. The articles are published and peer-reviewed free of charge. The journal provides free on-line access to full text publications. The articles given a unique digital object identifier (DOI). The journal is abstracted in leading international and national abstractig journals and scientometric databases, and also placed to the digital archives and libraries with free on-line access (INSPEC, DOI, ISSN, EBSCO, eLibrary.ru, Іndex Copernicus, Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, WorldCat, Google Scholar, DOAJ, Academic Keys, ADAT, DRJI, JournalTOCs, MIAR, SHERPA/RoMEO, BASE, CiteFactor, EZB, Impactfactor.pl, Journalindex.net, OAIster, OAJI, Research Bible, SIS, UIF, ZDB, VINITI, Ukrainica Naukova, Djerelo, URAN et al.). The journal is included in the list of the scientific specialized periodicals of Ukraine where the results of dissertations for Ph. D and D. Sc. in Technical Sciences, Physics and Mathematics сan be published. Printed versions of of the journal are distributed among leading libraries, as well as by subscription. The formatting rules and templates of articles, as well as accompanying documents to them are presented on the journal website http://ric.zntu.edu.ua/. Sincerely yours, Sergey Subbotin, Deputy Chief Editor, Dr. hab. Sc., Professor of Department of software tools of Zaporizhzhya National Technical University. E-mail: subbotin(a)zntu.edu.ua, subbotin.csit(a)gmail.com

Oct. 7, 2014

Postdoctoral position in machine learning and computer vision for biomedical data analysis

by Diego Sona

The Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision department (PAVIS - http://www.iit.it/pavis.html) at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia is looking for a highly qualified researcher in the field of Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Image Analysis with applications to Biomedical Data Analysis The position is available immediately and until filled. Evidence of top quality research on the specified areas in the form of published papers is mandatory. The salary will be commensurate to qualification and experience and in line to that of the research institutes in the rest of Europe. Further info can be found at http://iit.it/en/openings/research-departments/pattern-analysis-a-computer-… --------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Diego Sona Pattern Analysis & Computer Vision (PAVIS) Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) Via Morego 30, 16163, Genova, Italy Phone: +39 010 71781 819 E-mail: diego.sona(a)iit.it www.iit.it/pavis.html ---------------------------------------------------------

Oct. 7, 2014

Workshop on Networks

by Ermentrout, G Bard

Dear Colleagues, It is our pleasure to call your attention to a workshop "Advances in Discrete Networks" that we have organized, to be held at the University of Pittsburgh on December 12-14, 2014. This three-day workshop will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas relating to quantitative research about networks, pursued with a variety of perspectives and approaches. The event will bring together leading researchers in the field, with backgrounds in areas such as applied mathematics, mathematical biology, statistical physics, and computational methods, along with a diverse pool of graduate students, postdocs, and other scientists who are early in their careers. Indeed, one of the goals of the meeting is to promote the development and continuation of interdisciplinary collaborations in these areas, as well as the exchange of ideas between participants from a variety of backgrounds and career stages. More information about the meeting, including a list of speakers, is available at: http://www.math.pitt.edu/~lewicka/Semester_DiscrNetw_14/adv_disc_netw_works…<http://www.math.pitt.edu/%7Elewicka/Semester_DiscrNetw_14/adv_disc_netw_wor…> The meeting will include a poster session, and funds are available (under the NSF grant DMS-1446452) to support student and postdoc travel. If you or someone from your group is interested in attending, as we hope you will be, then please complete an application form, available at the above website or at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11lUhx_sWxe4F135goptKkh-Qu3ioEJwktfSU32M35J… Space is limited, so we encourage early applications. Thanks for your attention, Brent Doiron (brent.doiron(a)gmail.com<mailto:brent.doiron@gmail.com>) Bard Ermentrout (bard(a)pitt.edu<mailto:bard@pitt.edu>) Marta Lewicka (lewicka(a)pitt.edu<mailto:lewicka@pitt.edu>) Jon Rubin (jonrubin(a)pitt.edu<mailto:jonrubin@pitt.edu>)

Oct. 6, 2014

Postdoctoral position in theoretical neuroscience at the Hebrew University

by Yoram Burak

Yoram Burak's research group at the Hebrew University is seeking a highly motivated postdoctoral research fellow in theoretical neuroscience. The initial appointment will be for one year, with a possibility of extension. The group has a broad range of interests in theoretical and computational neuroscience, including: - Dynamics of short term memory in stochastic neural networks. - Sequence generation and learning in the brain. - Invariant perception in sensory processing. - Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex: spatial computation and coding in the brain. - Plasticity in neural networks. The group is part of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC), and of the Racah Institute of Physics. Both are located in the beautiful Safra campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Hebrew University is ranked first among Israel's research universities in the Shanghai ranking of world universities (the ARWU ranking), 70th in the world, and 47th in the natural sciences. Research at ELSC offers a vibrant scientific environment and excellent opportunities for interaction with researchers interested in systems and computational neuroscience. For more information, see: http://elsc.huji.ac.il. An international graduate program in computational neuroscience at ELSC (formerly the ICNC program) is entering its 23rd year this fall. Applicants must have an excellent research record in theoretical neuroscience, theoretical physics, mathematics, or a related field, and a keen interest in computational neuroscience. *To apply*: please send a CV and list of publications, a brief statement of research interests, and the names of three references to yoram.burak(a)elsc.huji.ac.il. Please ask your references to send letters of recommendation to the same email address. For full consideration please apply by November 15, 2014. Regards, Yoram Burak -- Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) Racah Institute of Physics Hebrew University of Jerusalem Safra Campus, Givat Ram Jerusalem 91904 http://elsc.huji.ac.il/burak

Oct. 6, 2014

New release of NeuroML 2 and LEMS and two recent publications

by Padraig Gleeson

Dear colleagues, We are happy to announce a new stable release (version 2, beta 3) of the NeuroML language for model specification in computational neuroscience. http://www.neuroml.org/getneuroml NeuroML allows specification of models of systems from integrate and fire cells up to complex 3D networks of multicompartmental neurons. NeuroML version 2 has been extensively redesigned to be built on a new language, LEMS, which allows machine readable definitions of model structure and dynamics. This facilitates model transparency, portability and code generation. LEMS and NeuroML 2 are described in detail in: Robert C. Cannon, Padraig Gleeson, Sharon Crook, Gautham Ganapathy, Boris Marin, Eugenio Piasini and R. Angus Silver, *LEMS: A language for expressing complex biological models in concise and hierarchical form and its use in underpinning NeuroML 2*, Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 2014, doi: 10.3389/fninf.2014.00079 There are libraries for reading, writing and simulating NeuroML models in Java (https://github.com/NeuroML/jNeuroML) and Python. The Python APIs for NeuroML and LEMS have recently been described in: Michael Vella, Robert C. Cannon, Sharon Crook, Andrew P. Davison, Gautham Ganapathy, Hugh P. C. Robinson, R. Angus Silver and Padraig Gleeson, *libNeuroML and PyLEMS: using Python to combine procedural and declarative modeling approaches in computational neuroscience*, Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 2014, doi: 10.3389/fninf.2014.00038 The growing number (30+) of tools, libraries and databases supporting NeuroML v1 and/or NeuroML v2 are listed here: http://www.neuroml.org/tool_support Open Source Brain is a repository of models in computational neuroscience which actively supports open, collaborative development of models, as well as conversion to simulator independent formats including NeuroML (over 500 valid NeuroML 2 cells/channels/synapses on OSB at last count). An overview of the models currently present and the formats/simulators supported can be found here: http://www.opensourcebrain.org/status Regards, The NeuroML development community ----------------------------------------------------- Padraig Gleeson Room 321, Anatomy Building Department of Neuroscience, Physiology& Pharmacology University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom +44 207 679 3214 p.gleeson(a)ucl.ac.uk -----------------------------------------------------

Oct. 6, 2014

postdoc in London, modelling bee brains (3 days to deadline)

by Lars Chittka

A HFSP-funded three-year postdoc position is available to build neural network models of various parts of the bee brain, in an effort to understand complex cognition in minimal circuitry terms, and to work towards whole-brain modelling (connectomics). The fellow will join a dynamic existing team of computational neuroscientists who work closely with behavioural/cognitive scientists to understand how miniature brains achieve behavioural complexity. Please forward the following link to anyone who might be interested. http://www.jobs.qmul.ac.uk/5111 Informal inquiries can be sent to l.chittka(a)qmul.ac.uk Thank you and best wishes, Lars -- Lars Chittka, PhD, MSc Professor in Sensory and Behavioural Ecology School of Biological and Chemical Sciences Fogg Building Queen Mary, University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS UK Email: l.chittka(a)qmul.ac.uk Tel *44 (0) 207 8823043 Room 2.13 via 2.10 http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/

Oct. 6, 2014

Multi-faculty hiring initiative in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Austin

by Ila Fiete

The University of Texas at Austin announces two faculty positions in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience, as part of a multi-faculty hiring initiative. The search is open at all levels, from Assistant Tenure-track to Tenured Full Professor. Please see the advertisements below. *Full|Associate|Assistant Professor in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience, Departments of Neuroscience and Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin * The Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin seeks exceptional researchers in the field of computational and theoretical neuroscience for appointment at the levels of Full Professor to Assistant Professor. The position will be joint with the Department of Mathematics, thus we especially encourage applications from leaders in computational and theoretical neuroscience whose work intersects with mathematical approaches including, but not limited to: dynamical systems, partial differential equations, algebraic geometry, statistics, information theory, stochastic processes, and applied and computational topology. This search is part of a multi-faculty hiring initiative in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience at UT Austin -- including a position in Psychology and a joint position between Neuroscience and Computer Science, with the aim of building on existing strengths to create a Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience center. The successful candidate(s) will orchestrate an outstanding program of independent research and contribute to an environment of diversity in higher education through research, teaching, and service. The position will include full access to the Texas Advanced Computing Center supercomputers, and the option to join various multi-disciplinary advanced computing and neuroscience centers on campus. Austin is a vibrant university town with a large high-tech center, a legendary live-music culture, and has consistently ranked amongst the top five towns to live in the United States in various surveys. Qualified applicants with a Ph.D. or equivalent, appropriate post-graduate experience, and an exceptional research record will be considered for appointment. Applications are being reviewed from September 2014 onwards, until the position is filled. Please submit applications through academicjobsonline (https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/4726) A complete application will include: 1. Statement of research interests. 2. Curriculum vita. 3. Letters of reference from at least 3 individuals (Assistant Professor) or 6 individuals (Associate or Full Professor). 4. A statement of teaching philosophy and experience, with evidence of teaching excellence (Assistant Professor). UT Austin is an equal opportunity employer committed to excellence through diversity. We strongly encourage applications from all qualified individuals including women and minorities. UT Austin is responsive to the needs of dual career couples and is dedicated to work-life balance through an array of family-friendly policies (http://www.utexas.edu/provost/policies/family/) For further inquires related to this search, please email Kathleen Pantalion (kpantalion(a)mail.clm.utexas.edu <mailto:kpantalion@mail.clm.utexas.edu>). **Full|Associate|Assistant Professor *in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience, Departments of Neuroscience and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin * The Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin seeks exceptional researchers in the field of computational and theoretical neuroscience for appointment at the levels of Full Professor to Assistant Professor. The position will be joint with the Department of Computer Science, thus we especially encourage applications from leaders in computational and theoretical neuroscience whose work intersects with computer science approaches including, but not limited to, information and complexity theory, computational modeling, computational geometry, statistics, machine learning, robotics, graphical models, stochastic processes, coding theory, and data mining. This search is part of a multi-faculty hiring initiative in Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience at UT Austin -- including a position in Psychology and a joint position between Neuroscience and Mathematics, with the aim of building on existing strengths to create a Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience center. The successful candidate(s) will orchestrate an outstanding program of independent research and contribute to an environment of diversity in higher education through research, teaching, and service. The position will include full access to the Texas Advanced Computing Center supercomputers, and the option to join various multi-disciplinary advanced computing and neuroscience centers on campus. Austin is a vibrant university town with a large high-tech center, a legendary live-music culture, and has consistently ranked amongst the top five towns to live in the United States in various surveys. Qualified applicants with a Ph.D. or equivalent, appropriate post-graduate experience if relevant, and an exceptional research record will be considered for appointment. The department prefers to receive applications online, beginning September 2014, onwards. To submit your application, please review the Checklist (http://services.cs.utexas.edu/recruit/faculty/frontmatter/checklist.html) and then go to My Application (http://services.cs.utexas.edu/recruit/faculty/applicant/) A complete application will include: 1. Statement of research interests. 2. Curriculum vita. 3. Letters of reference from at least 3 individuals (Assistant Professor) or 6 individuals (Associate or Full Professor). 4. For appointment as Assistant Professor, a statement of teaching philosophy and experience, with evidence of teaching excellence. UT Austin is an equal opportunity employer committed to excellence through diversity. We strongly encourage applications from all qualified individuals including women and minorities. UT Austin is responsive to the needs of dual career couples and is dedicated to work-life balance through an array of family-friendly policies (http://www.utexas.edu/provost/policies/family/) For further inquires related to this search, please email Kathleen Pantalion (kpantalion(a)mail.clm.utexas.edu <mailto:kpantalion@mail.clm.utexas.edu>).

Oct. 6, 2014

CFP: IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM) Special Issue: “Computational Intelligence for Changing Environments"

by Dr Amir Hussain

CALL FOR PAPERS IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE SPECIAL ISSUE ON "Computational Intelligence for Changing Environments" AIMS AND SCOPE: Over the past decade or so, computational intelligence techniques have been highly successful for solving big data challenges in changing environments. In particular, there has been growing interest in so called biologically inspired learning (BIL), which refers to a wide range of learning techniques, motivated by biology, that try to mimic specific biological functions or behaviors. Examples include the hierarchy of the brain neocortex and neural circuits, which have resulted in biologically-inspired features for encoding, deep neural networks for classification, and spiking neural networks for general modelling. To ensure that these models are generalizable to unseen data, it is common to assume that the training and test data are independently sampled from an identical distribution, known as the sample i.i.d. assumption. In dynamic and non- stationary environments, the distribution of data changes over time, resulting in the phenomenon of ‘concept drift’ (also known as population drift or concept shift), which is a generalization of covariance shift in statistics. Over the last five years, transfer learning and multitask learning have been used to tackle this problem. Fundamental analyses using probably approximately correct (PAC) and Rademacher complexity frameworks have explained why appropriate incorporation of context and concept drift can improve generalizability in changing environments. It is possible to use human-level processing power to tackle concept drift in changing environments. Concept drift is a real-world problem, usually associated with online and concept learning, where the relationships between input data and target variables dynamically change over time. Traditional learning schemes do not adequately address this issue, either because they are offline or because they avoid dynamic learning. However, BIL seems to possess properties that would be helpful for solving concept drift problems in changing environments. Intuitively, the human capacity to deal with concept drift is innate to cognitive processes, and the learning problems susceptible to concept drift seem to share some of the dynamic demands placed on plastic neural areas in the brain. Using improved biological models in neural networks can provide insight into cognitive computational phenomena. However, a main outstanding issue in using computational intelligence for changing environments and domain adaptation is how to build complex networks, or how networks should be connected to the features, samples, and distribution drifts. Manual design and building of these networks are beyond current human capabilities. Recently, computational intelligence methods has been used to address concept drift in changing environments, with promising results. A Hebbian learning model has been used to handle random, as well as correlated, concept drift. Neural networks have been used for concept drift detection, and the influence of latent variables on concept drift in a neural network has been studied. In another study, a timing-dependent synapse model has been applied to concept drift. These works mainly apply biologically-plausible computational models to concept drift problems. Although these results are still in their infancy, they open up new possibilities to achieve brain-like intelligence for solving concept drift problems in changing environments. Taking the current state of research in computational intelligence for changing environments into account, the objective of this special issue is to collate this research to help unify the concepts and terminology of computational intelligence in changing environments, and to survey state-of-the-art computational intelligence methodologies and the key techniques investigated to date. Therefore, this special issue invites submissions on the most recent developments in computational intelligence for changing environments, algorithms and architectures, theoretical foundations, and representations, & their application to real-world problems. We also welcome timely surveys & review papers. TOPICS OF INTEREST include (but are not limited to): • Computational intelligence methodologies and implementation for changing environments •Transfer learning, Multitask learning, Domain adaption •Incremental Learning architectures, Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning architectures •Incremental Knowledge augmentation, Representation learning and disentangling •Incremental Adaptive Neuro-fuzzy systems •Incremental and single-pass data mining •Incremental Neural Clustering & Regression •Incremental Adaptive decision systems •Incremental Feature selection and reduction •Incremental Constructive Learning •Novelty detection in Incremental learning SUBMISSION PROCESS The maximum length for the manuscript is typically 25 pages in single column format with double-spacing, including figures and references. Authors should specify in the first page of their manuscripts the corresponding author’s contact and up to 5 keywords. Submission should be made via: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ieee-cim-cice2015 IMPORTANT DATES (for August 2015 Issue) 15th November, 2014: Submission of Manuscripts 15th January, 2015: Notification of Review Results 15th February, 2015: Submission of Revised Manuscripts 15th March, 2015: Submission of Final Manuscripts GUEST EDITORS Professor Amir Hussain, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK Email: ahu(a)cs.stir.ac.uk http://cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu/ Professor Dacheng Tao, University of Technology, Sydney, 235 Jones Street, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia Email: dacheng.tao(a)uts.edu.au Professor Jonathan Wu University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Avenue, Windsor, ON, Canada Email: jwu(a)uwindsor.ca Professor Dongbin Zhao Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China E-mail: dongbin.zhao(a)gmail.com ----- A PDF copy of the CFP is attached with this email for forwarding to interested colleagues. It is also available for download from: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~ahu/IEEE-CIM-CICE2015.pdf For more information on the IEEE CIM, see: http://cis.ieee.org/ieee-computational-intelligence-magazine.html -- The University of Stirling has been ranked in the top 12 of UK universities for graduate employment*. 94% of our 2012 graduates were in work and/or further study within six months of graduation. *The Telegraph The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159.

Oct. 2, 2014

Postdoctoral Researcher and Engineer Positions in Multi-scale Neural Modeling, OIST

by Kenji Doya

Postdoctoral Researcher and Engineer Positions in Multi-scale Neural Modeling Neural Computation Unit Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology started a new project “Brain/MINDS” that aims to create structural and anatomical maps of the marmoset brain using innovative technologies. Within this project, the group lead by Prof. Kenji Doya at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) will develop computational frameworks for constructing multi-scale neural models that link cellular and network dynamics to behavioral and cognitive functions by utilizing large-scale anatomical and physiological data sets. Positions are available for postdoctoral researchers and engineers to work on one or more of the following subtopics: 1) Estimation of cellular and synaptic parameters from connectome, imaging, and electrode recording data. 2) Automated reduction of conductance-based models to integrate-and-fire models, and spiking neural network models to population firing rate models. 3) Application and validation of the above methods with the data being produced by the project. Candidates should have Ph.D. or masters degree in mathematics, computer science or relevant areas and must have strong skills in programming, data analysis, and simulation. Experience in statistical machine learning and/or computational neuroscience is desired. OIST offers an excellent interdisciplinary research environment, including high-performance computing, in its campus overlooking beautiful coastline and coral reefs. Researchers will have opportunities to closely collaborate with leading neuroscientists participating in the project. Initial appointment will be from October 2014 to March 2015, with a possibility of renewal till March 2017. Competitive salary is offered based on the candidate’s experience. OIST is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and provides strong support for its staff and family members coming from abroad. Applicants should send a CV, publication list, statement of research, and contact information of three referees to Prof. Kenji Doya <doya(a)oist.jp>. ---- Kenji Doya <doya(a)oist.jp> Neural Computation Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology 1919-1 Tancha, Onna, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan Phone: +81-98-966-8594; Fax: +81-98-966-2891 https://groups.oist.jp/ncu

Oct. 2, 2014