Connectionists: Proceedings on Adaptive Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

[timo.honkela@hut.fi]

We are pleased to announce that the proceedings of AKRR'05,
International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Adaptive
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning are available online at

  http://www.cis.hut.fi/AKRR05/papers/

In their keynote paper, Hyvarinen, Hoyer, Hurri and Gutmann present
statistical models of images and early vision. They refer to the
widely-spread assumption that biological visual systems are adapted to
process the particular kind of information they receive. Hyvarinen
et al. review work on modelling statistical regularities in
ecologically valid visual input (natural images) and the obtained
functional explanation of the properties of visual neurons. They refer
to linear sparse coding as a seminal statistical model for natural
images, that is also equivalent to the independent component analysis
(ICA) model. The authors describe models that lead to emergence of
further properties of visual neurons: the topographic organization
and complex cell receptive fields.

Gabriella Vigliocco's keynote talk highlighted the fruitful connection
between the psychological empirical research in one hand and the
computational analysis and modeling on the other. In their paper,
Andrews, Vigliocco and Vinson consider the integration of
attributional and distributional information in a probabilistic model
of meaning representation. The authors present models of how meaning
is represented in the brain/mind, based upon the assumption that
children develop meaning representations for words using two main
sources of information: information derived from their concrete
experience with objects and events in the world and information
implicitly derived from exposure to language. They first present a
model developed using self-organising maps starting from
speaker-generated features. The also present a probabilistic model
that integrates the attributional information with distributional
information derived from text corpora.

The methodologically oriented papers in the proceedings consider
adaptive systems, knowledge representation and reasoning from
various points of view. Adaptive approaches and emergent
representations based on contextual information are strongly present
in the papers related to language and cognition.

There were two special symposia in the conference that provide a
focused view on their topics: ``Adaptive Models of Knowledge, Language
and Cognition'' (AMKLC'05) and ``Knowledge Representation for
Bioinformatics'' (KRBIO'05). The proceedings of these symposia are
also included at the web site

  http://www.cis.hut.fi/AKRR05/papers/

Best regards,

On behalf of the editors,
Timo Honkela



--
Timo Honkela, Chief Research Scientist, PhD, Docent
Neural Networks Research Center
Laboratory of Computer and Information Science
Helsinki University of Technology
P.O.Box 5400, FI-02015 TKK

timo.honkela at tkk.fi,  http://www.cis.hut.fi/tho/