Phantoms never die: living with unreliable population data

Population coding with unreliable spikes

The need for a neuronal coding scheme that is robust against the corruption of action potentials seems to support the idea of population rate coding, where the relevance of a single spike decreases proportional to the increase of population size. In order to test this intuition, we here investigate the e*ciency and robustness of a population rate coding scheme in comparison to a place coding sc...

Computational Probability : Old Ideas Never Die

Summarising Unreliable Data

Unreliable data is present in datasets, and is either ignored, acknowledged ad hoc, or undetected. This paper discusses data quality issues with a potential framework in mind to deal with them. Such a framework should be applied within data-to-text systems at the generation of text rather than being an afterthought. This paper also shows ways to express uncertainty through language and World He...

We Are Never Alone: Living with the Human Microbiota

The human body is inhabited by millions of tiny living organisms, which, all together, are called the human microbiota. Bacteria are microbes found on the skin, in the nose, mouth, and especially in the gut. We acquire these bacteria during birth and the first years of life, and they live with us throughout our lives. The human microbiota is involved in healthy growth, in protecting the body fr...

Old Linguists Never Die, They Only Get Obligatorily Deleted

Martin Kay, in his speech delivered in 2005 on receipt of his ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, specified computational linguistics as follows: “Computational linguistics is trying to do what linguists do in a computational manner” (Kay 2005, page 429). I believe it is a legitimate question for a computational linguist to ask what linguists do. Coming from Prague, it is then quite a natural quest...