The paper describes and demonstrates an optimization tool that combines methods developed independently in the fields of structural engineering and fine art. Optimization has a long history in structural engineering. Most commonly, structural optimization seeks a configuration that minimizes material volume, subject to constraints on strength and stiffness. Metaheuristic search methods, such as...

The dry landscape garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, a UNESCO world heritage site, intrigues hundreds of thousands of visitors every year with its abstract, sparse and seemingly random composition of rocks and moss on an otherwise empty rectangle of raked gravel. Here we apply a model of shape analysis in early visual processing to show that the 'empty' space of the garden is implicitly ...

A novel model is presented to learn bimodally informative structures from audio-visual signals. The signal is represented as a sparse sum of audio-visual kernels. Each kernel is a bimodal function consisting of synchronous snippets of an audio waveform and a spatio-temporal visual basis function. To represent an audio-visual signal, the kernels can be positioned independently and arbitrarily in...

ProView is a web application for exploratory analysis of protein structure. The tool seeks to eliminate the highly manual and repetative pipeline of data subsetting across multiple disjoined software. ProView combines a 3D structure rendering with dynamic scatterplots of numerical data and exposes a clean visual interface for data manipulation through mouse interaction. The application is built...

One of the meanings that can be assigned to the expression Visual Programming Language (VPL) is that of a programming language whose tokens are visual, rather than textual. Despite the linguistic parallel, however, VPL's can hardly challenge their textual counterparts in the construction of even very simple software programs. But Visual Command Languages (VCL's) seem to have nearly overtaken th...

In several experiments, it was found that global perception of spatial form can arise exclusively from unpredictable but synchronized changes among local features. Within an array of nonoverlapping apertures, contours move in one of two directions, with direction reversing randomly over time. When contours within a region of the array reverse directions in synchrony, they stand out conspicuousl...

Visual space embodies all visual experiences, yet what determines the topographical structure of visual space remains unclear. Here we test a novel theoretical framework that proposes intrinsic lateral connections in the visual cortex as the mechanism underlying the structure of visual space. The framework suggests that the strength of lateral connections between neurons in the visual cortex sh...

We analysed the activation profiles obtained by simulating invasion of an orthodromic action potential in eleven anterogradely filled and serially reconstructed terminal arbors of callosal axons originating and terminating in areas 17 and 18 of the adult cat. This was done in order to understand how geometry relates to computational properties of axons. In the simulation, conduction from the ca...

This paper demonstrates a method of using non-metric visual information derived from an uncalibrated active vision system to navigate an autonomous vehicle through freespace regions detected in a cluttered environment. The structure of 3-space is recovered modulo an affine transformation using an uncalibrated active stereo head carried by the vehicle. The plane at infinity, necessary for recove...

The common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) communicates and camouflages itself by changing its skin colour and texture. Hanlon and Messenger (1988 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 320, 437-487) classified these visual displays, recognizing 13 distinct body patterns. Although this conclusion is based on extensive observations, a quantitative method for analysing complex patterning has obvious advanta...