NIPS 93 Announcement: Workshop on Selective Attention

[Ernst Niebur]

Fellow Connectionists:

We would like to announce the final program of a workshop on visual
selective attention to be held at this year's NIPS conference. The
conference will be held from Nov.  29 to Dec. 2 in Denver, CO, the
workshop will be held Dec. 3 and 4 "at a nearby ski area."

For NIPS conference and workshop registration info, please write to:  NIPS*93
Registration / NIPS Foundation / PO Box 60035 / Pasadena, CA  91116-6035 USA

For questions concerning this workshop, please contact either of the
organizers by e-mail.

--Ernst Niebur    

      

   NIPS*93 Workshop:	Neurobiology, Psychophysics, and Computational
   ================= 	Models of Visual Attention


   Intended Audience:   Experimentalists, modelers and others interested in
   ==================	visual attention and high-level vision

   Organizers:
   ===========

   Ernst Niebur		        Bruno Olshausen
   ernst at caltech.edu		bruno at lgn.wustl.edu


   Program:
   ========

   In any physical computational system, processing resources are
   limited, which inevitably leads to bottlenecks in the processing of
   sensory information.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the primate
   visual system, where the massive amount of information provided by the
   optic nerve far exceeds what the brain is capable of fully processing
   and assimilating into conscious experience.  Visual attention thus
   serves as a mechanism for selecting certain portions of the input to
   be processed preferentially, shifting the processing focus from one
   location to another in a serial fashion.  The study of visual
   attention is integral to our understanding of higher visual function,
   and it may also be of practical benefit to machine vision as well.

   What we know of visual attention has been learned from a combination
   of psychophysical, neurophysiological, and computational approaches.
   Psychophysical studies have revealed the behavioral consequences of
   visual attention by measuring either a speed-up in observer's reaction
   time or an improvement in discrimination performance when the observer
   is attending to a task. Neurophysiological studies, on the other hand,
   have attempted to reveal the neural mechanisms and brain areas
   involved in attention by measuring the modulation in single cell
   firing rate or in the activity in a part of the brain as a function of
   the attentional state of the subject.  A number of computational
   models based on these studies have been proposed to address the
   question of how attention eases the computational burdens faced by the
   brain in pattern recognition or other visual tasks, and how attention
   is controlled and expressed at the neuronal level.

   The goal of this workshop will be to bring together experts from each
   of these fields to discuss the latest advances in their approaches to
   studying visual attention.  Half the available time has been reserved
   for informal presentations and the other half for discussion.


   Morning session:

   7:30-8:00	Introduction/overview

		"Covert Visual Attention: The Phenomenon" 
		(Ernst Niebur, Caltech)
   		(7:50-8:00: Discussion)

   8:00-9:00	Neurobiology

	8:00	"Effects of Focal Attention on Receptive Field 
		 Profiles in Area V4"
		(Ed Connor, Washington University)
		(8:20-8:30: Discussion)

	8:30	"Neurophysiological evidence of scene segmentation
		 by feature selective, parallel attentive mechanisms"
		(Brad Motter, VA Medical Center/SUNY-HSC, Syracuse)
		(8:50-9:00: Discussion)

   9:00-9:30	General Discussion


   Afternoon session:

   4:30-5:00	Psychophysics

		"Attention and salience: alternative mechanisms of 
		 visual selection"
		(Jochen Braun, Caltech)
		(4:50-5:00: Discussion)

   5:00-6:00	Computational models

   	5:00   	"Models for the neural implementation of attention 
		 based on the temporal structure of neural signals"
		(Ernst Niebur, Caltech)
		(5:20-5:30: Discussion)

	5:30   	"Dynamic routing circuits for visual attention"
		(Bruno Olshausen, Washington University/Caltech)
		(5:50-6:00: Discussion)

   6:00-6:30	General discussion