Friday, March 30, 2001. The good news is the cornucopia of brand new data. Dealing with information exchange and dependencies among collections of spike trains, which are the carriers of biological information, requires joint measures. Information theory provides a very general method for examining information exchange but it suffers from an inability to deal with more than just a few seconds of data. Joint spike-train sequences measured in the cat visual system provide a partial roadmap for helping us find our way through the thicket.
Engineers have a great deal to learn from systems that have evolved naturally.
A natural constraint is then a very small number of missed detections, with performance measured by computation and the false alarm rate. There is then a natural dependency structure for cost, invariance and discrimination. Finally, experiments with Francois Fleuret on face detection demonstrate that such indexing strategies are in fact highly efficient in practice. This gives a Stochastic Control Interpretation for Nonlinear Path Estimation. Our research on artificial actuators, sensors and robots is motivated by exquisite geometry, movement and function of creatures.