Our understanding of visual processing in general, and contour integration in particular, has undergone great change over the last 10 years. There is now an accumulation of psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence that the outputs of cells with conjoint orientation preference and spatial position are integrated in the process of explication of rudimentary contours. Recent neuroanatomical ...

We investigate an extension of the spike train stochastic model based on the conditional intensity, in which the recovery function includes an interaction between several excitatory neural units. Such function is proposed as depending both on the time elapsed since the last spike and on the last spiking unit. Our approach, being somewhat related to the competing risks model, allows to obtain th...

How information is encoded and decoded via spontaneous oscillations is investigated by using an ensemble of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons. A signal can be encoded in spontaneous and highly irregular spike trains via high-order rate coding with the second-order statistics being relevant, in which the temporal structure and the correlation between the spikes are taken into account. Although the encoded ...

It has long been debated whether information in the brain is coded at the rate of neuronal spiking or at the precise timing of single spikes. Although this issue is essential to the understanding of neural signal processing, it is not easily resolved because the two mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. We suggest revising this coding issue so that one hypothesis is uniquely selected for a giv...

The characterization of functional network structures among multiple neurons is essential to understanding neural information processing. Information geometry (IG), a theory developed for investigating a space of probability distributions has recently been applied to spike-train analysis and has provided robust estimations of neural interactions. Although neural firing in the equilibrium state ...

The stable aerosol retrieval algorithm needs a prior assumption of lidar ratio (the extinction-to-backscatter ratio), and the known aerosol type that is the prerequisite of the assumption, so how to identify the clouds from lidar profile is fundamental to acquire atmospheric optical parameter. CALIPSO is a space-borne lidar and it can observe the aerosol characteristic, but can not penetrate th...

A recent experiment, performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has demonstrated that by locking a microwave oscillator to an optical pulse train from a modelocked laser, exceptional timing stability can be achieved. In the experiment, a 10.225-GHz microwave oscillator was locked to an optical phase detection apparatus consisting of a modelocked laser, a Sagnac interferometer, and ...

The inauguration of the Shinkansen high-speed train service between Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, at 210 kph maximum operating speed some 40 years ago marked the comeback of the train as an important passenger mode of transport. Since then highspeed train (HST) services have been introduced in many countries and are planned in many more, and the train has once more become the dominant mode of transpo...