Centering on nanobiotech

NanoBiotech 2008: Exploring global advances in nanomedicine.

Speakers presenting at NanoBiotech 2008 (http://www. alumni.rpi.edu/nanobio2008.html) focused on innovations in nanomedicine and applications of nanotechnology to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. While exploring some of the cutting-edge research efforts globally underway, the presenters highlighted the urgent need for vigilance with regard to toxicity. Ethical issues were also e...

Functional Centering

Based on empirical evidence from a free word order language (German) we propose a fundamental revision of the principles guiding the ordering of discourse entities in the forward-looking centers within the centering model. We claim that grammatical role criteria should be replaced by indicators of the functional information structure of the utterances, i.e., the distinction between context-boun...

Dynamic Centering

Temporal Centering

We present a semantic and pragmatic account of the anaphoric properties of past and perfect that improves on previous work by integrating discourse structure, aspectual type, surface structure and commonsense knowledge. A novel aspect of our account is that we distinguish between two kinds of temporal intervals in the interpretation of temporal operators-discourse reference intervals and event ...

On Centering Neural Network Weight Updates ?

It has long been known that neural networks can learn faster when their input and hidden unit activities are centered about zero; recently we have extended this approach to also encompass the centering of error signals (Schraudolph and Sejnowski, 1996). Here we generalize this notion to all factors involved in the weight update, leading us to propose centering the slope of hidden unit activatio...