It is a widely held view in contemporary computational neuroscience that the brain responds to sensory input by producing sparse distributed representations. In this paper we investigate a brain-inspired spatial pooling algorithm that produces such sparse distributed representations by modelling the formation of proximal dendrites associated with neocortical minicolumns. In this approach, distr...

How can di¤erent individuals’probability assignments to some events be aggregated into a collective probability assignment? Although there are several classic results on this problem, they all assume that the ‘agenda’of relevant events forms a -algebra, an overly demanding assumption for many practical applications. We drop this assumption and explore probabilistic opinion pooling on general ag...

How can several individuals’opinions on some factual matters be aggregated into uni…ed collective opinions? This question arises in many contexts. A panel of climate experts may have to aggregate the panelists’con‡icting opinions into a compromise view, in order to deliver a report to the government. A jury may have to arrive at a collective opinion on the facts of a case, despite disagreements...

We introduce and define the concept of a stochastic pooling network (SPN), as a model for sensor systems where redundancy and two forms of ‘noise’ – lossy compression and randomness – interact in surprising ways. Our approach to analyzing SPNs is information theoretic. We define an SPN as a network with multiple nodes that each produce noisy and compressed measurements of the same information. ...

We introduce a concept we call “mutual metainformation” as a criterion for determining the maximum statistically significant number of clusters in distributional clustering problems. In distributional clustering, one has data drawn from an ensemble of probability distributions and seeks to group similar distributions together. We focus on the case of multinomials, such as a set of biased coins ...

BACKGROUND The availability of annotated corpora has facilitated the application of machine learning algorithms to concept extraction from clinical notes. However, high expenditure and labor are required for creating the annotations. A potential alternative is to reuse existing corpora from other institutions by pooling with local corpora, for training machine taggers. In this paper we have inv...

OBJECTIVE To study the characteristics of the reflectivity of the cystoid spaces and serous retinal detachment (SRD) on spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) and the correlation with fluorescein findings in diabetic macular edema (DME). DESIGN Retrospective, observational, cross-sectional study. PARTICIPANTS Consecutive 134 eyes of 114 patients with clinically significant ma...

In this work, we propose Attentive Pooling (AP), a two-way attention mechanism for discriminative model training. In the context of pair-wise ranking or classification with neural networks, AP enables the pooling layer to be aware of the current input pair, in a way that information from the two input items can directly influence the computation of each other’s representations. Along with such ...

We present a model where the enforcement of international risk sharing contracts is costly. With non diversifiable enforcement costs, welfare is not necessarily maximized for perfect worldwide risk sharing. Some groupings, or “pools” of countries can deliver higher welfare, with higher diversification gains net of enforcement costs. We construct an exhaustive list of such pools of countries. Fo...

Neotrópica and the nearby town of Golfito, involves building a medical clinic in La Gamba. The Rainforest of the Austrians has once again been collecting donations, this time to pay for the hospital's equipment. Thus the Rainforest of the Austrians is managing to involve and benefit the local community while continuing to work towards its primary goals of conservation, research and education. T...