The age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the main cause of blindness among people over 50 years in developed countries and there are 150 million people affected worlwide. This disease can lead to severe loss central vision and adversely affect the patient’s quality of life. The appearance of drusen is associated with the early AMD, so we proposed a top-down methodology to detect drusen in ...

The Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji is an ecotourism project designed to protect a small reef patch and its fauna while preserving the livelihood of local communities. It involves the local communities by using a participatory business planning approach to Marine Protected Area management, generating income through diver user fees, distributed to the local villages that have exchanged their t...

We investigate the mechanisms that allow people to successfully understand language given noise in the world and in their own perceptual inputs. We address two parts of this question. First, what knowledge do people use to make sense of language inputs that may have been corrupted? Second, how much of this knowledge is used while people are processing sentences? We conduct a sentence production...

Semantic systems for the representation of declarative knowledge are usually unconnected to neuro-biological mechanisms in the brain. In this paper we report on efforts to bridge this gap by proposing a neural-symbolic network based on processing principles of the cortical column. We show how a locally controlled activation spread on conceptual nodes leads to bottom-up and top-down processing s...

Graph languages defined by hyperedge replacement grammars can be NP-complete. We study predictive shift-reduce (PSR) parsing for a subclass of these grammars, which generalizes the concepts of SLR(1) string parsing to graphs. PSR parsers run in linear space and time. In comparison to the predictive top-down (PTD) parsers recently developed by the authors, PSR parsing is more efficient and more ...

This paper describes a series of experiments aimed at producing a bot tom-up parser that will produce partial parses suitable for use in robust interpretation and still be reasonably efficient. In the course of these experiments, we improved parse times by a factor of 18 over our first a t tempt, ending with a system that was twice as fast as our previous parser, which relied on strong top-down...

We present a tabular interpretation for a class of 2{Stack Automata that may be used to describe bottom-up parsing strategies for TAGs. The results are also useful for tabulating other existing bottom-up automata models for this kind of languages.

In our study we use the experimental framework of priming to manipulate our subjects‘ expectations of syllable prominence in sentences with a well-defined syntactic and phonological structure. It shows that it is possible to prime prominence patterns and that priming leads to significant differences in the judgment of syllable prominence.