Dissertation announcement (with demo and software)

[Yoonsuck - Choe]

Dear Colleagues,

It is my pleasure to announce the availability of my Ph.D. dissertation,
completed last year at the Department of Computer Sciences at the 
University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Dr. Risto
Miikkulainen.

* See below for the URLs of the dissertation, demo, and software.

Title: Perceptual Grouping in a Self-Organizing Map of Spiking Neurons

Author: Yoonsuck Choe

Abstract:

 Perceptual grouping is the process of identifying the constituents in the
 visual scene that together form a coherent object. The goal of this thesis is
 to understand the neural mechanisms of perceptual grouping. The hypotheses are
 that (1) perceptual grouping is carried out through synchronized firing of
 neurons representing the same object, and that (2) self-organized lateral
 connections encoding statistical regularities of the visual environment
 mediate such a synchronization. A self-organizing neural network of spiking
 neurons was developed to test these hypotheses in the perceptual grouping task
 of contour integration. The network self-organized orientation maps and patchy
 lateral connections similar to those found in the visual cortex, and the
 contour integration, segmentation, and completion performance measured by the
 degree of synchrony in neural populations accurately predicted human
 performance. Such results suggest that synchronized activity can represent
 perceptual events, and statistical properties of the input can shape the
 structure of the cortex and the perceptual performance. By providing a
 computational framework where perceptual performance and neural structure can
 be compared, the model helps us understand the neural mechanisms of perceptual
 grouping. 


Dissertation download:
	http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/ftp/choe.diss.abstract.html

Software:
	http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/src/pglissom-1.1.tar.gz

Demo:
	http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/demo/pglissom/


Yoonsuck Choe

Assistant Professor
Deptartment of Computer Science   
Texas A&M University     
email:	  choe at tamu.edu 
homepage: http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/choe/