Ganesh Swami

Neuroscientists are trying to figure out how different parts of the hippocampus are responsible for identifying previously visited places. Quoting from the Science summary, “Where am I?” by André A. Fenton:

The collective discharging of place cells allows us to predict the rat’s location by, in a sense, reading its mind. Knowing a rat’s location from the activity of its neurons is astonishing given that rats, like people, have no specific spatial sense organs analogous to, for example, the visual or auditory systems. Somehow spatial knowledge is assembled by the brain.

This is interesting to me because there’s a lot of work being done on analyzing deformations in the hippocampus to distinguish between Alzheimer’s and normal dementia. Being able to distinguish between the two in a blind setting is extremely valuable.

The official TED blog makes a list of 100 websites that you should know and use. I know what I’ll be doing when I have time to spare.

The Web is constantly turning out new and extraordinary services many of us are unfamiliar with. During TED University at this spring’s TED2007 in Monterey, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, offered an ultra-fast-moving ride through sites in many different areas, from art, design and illustration, to daily news, blogs and curiosity. Now, by popular demand, here’s his list of 100 websites you should know and use.

Here’s the deal:

• Google lists the post on my favorite wordpress plugins as the second hit for my name.

• Spammers target this highly visible post for all the spam (about 90% on just this post.) Fortunately, akismet blocks almost all of them.

• I have a plugin installed that organizes the dates in my sitemap by the most recent updates. The amount of spam causes the last modified date on the post to be updated regularly.

• Google uses this information to repeatedly crawl the aforementioned post, thinking it’s a highly active page.

• Positive feedback ensues.

As I had previously written, I’m doing a fair bit of machine learning these days for automated disease classification. I found a whitepaper by Tom Mitchell that gives a broad overview of the field.

How can we build computer systems that automatically improve with experience, and what are the fundamental laws that govern all learning processes?

Application Successes: Speech recognition, Computer vision, Bio-surveillance, Robot control and Accelerating empirical sciences.

Current research questions:

• Using unlabeled data for supervised learning
• Transfer knowledge from learning one task to another
• Relationship between different learning algorithms
• Strategy for learners that collect their own data
• Data privacy in data mining

The top conferences and journals in Machine Learning as stated in the paper:

• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
• Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
• Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT).
• Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). Freely available.
• Machine Learning.

Still Alive. It’s been relatively quite here because I’ve been swamped with end-of-term activities. The problem with working on five year long projects is that deadlines are self-imposed. My strategy has been to make sticky notes with tasks and not getting up until I strike off the task and crumple the note. This has been super effective for me. It’s nice to feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day with the big pile of crumpled notes. Hey, what ever works!

This isn’t so good for learning stuff. I’ve had to do a fair bit of machine learning for some of the tasks I’m doing right now, and all of the language is foreign to me. It took me about a week to learn how to check for group mean differences between samples, but only about an hour to implement it in code. I guess this is “holding a program in one’s head.“

To meet accreditation requirements, Engineering students are required to do a major work term report atleast once. This is a big undertaking. Fortunately, I’m doing mine on my latest infatuation: fluid match. I’ve written a couple of sections, but it’s still lacking cohesiveness.

I’m also happy to say that I’ve decided to do my honors thesis at the Medical Image Analysis Lab, where I’ve been working for the past eight months. The exact details of my project are to worked out, so I don’t have much to say at this point.

I didn’t know what some of the settings on my camera were and this bothered me. I whipped out the manual (I thought I had trashed it, as I usually do) and checked it out. I can now take pictures like the one above with little difficulty, and it looks like I know what I’m doing. It’s still long ways before I exhaust the capabilities of my current camera.

Life’s Good.