US-United Kingdom Cooperative Science: A Theoretical Study of the Perceptual Prerequisites of Learning

该奖项将支持安德鲁博士与 马萨诸塞州大学的Barto和Horace Barlow教授， 英国剑桥大学生理实验室。 巴托医生 将在国王学院的研究中心休假六个月 在剑桥中心。 他将参加研究中心的 生物信息处理计划，并将合作 与巴洛博士一起制定和评估感知原则 与促进目标导向学习有关的。 研究人员建议调查如何编码方案， 感官输入，最低限度地取决于特定的行为， 学习，可以促进这种学习。 他们将研究各种 现有的和新的编码原则， 对目标导向学习的影响。他们将重点 特别是巴洛提出的关于最小化 熵编码原理。 研究人员计划进行比较， 在理论上对比这些原则，并在需要时，通过 计算机实验 他们还将把他们的理论 与编码原则相关的数据的调查结果， 神经元群体。 巴托博士是公认的领导者， 实时计算学习领域的问题和巴洛博士 多年来一直是大脑领域的杰出研究者 perception. 这项研究的结果应该是一个重要的 有助于理解 生物和人工神经网络。

This award will support collaborative research between Dr. Andrew Barto, University of Massachusetts, and Professor Horace Barlow, Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge University, England. Dr. Barto will spend a six month sabbatical at the King's College Research Center at Cambridge. He will participate in the Research Center's Program on Biological Information Processing and will collaborate with Dr. Barlow on formulating and evaluating perceptual principles that are linked to the facilitation of goal-directed learning. The investigators propose to investigate how encoding schemes for sensory input, depending minimally on the specific behavior to be learned, can facilitate that learning. They will examine a variety of existing and novel coding principles with respect to their implications for goal-directed learning. They will focus particularly on the ideas being developed by Barlow on minimum entropy encoding principles. The investigators plan to compare and contrast these principles theoretically and, where need arises, via computational experiments. They will also relate their theoretical findings to data relevant to the coding principles exhibited by populations of neurons. Dr. Barto is a recognized leader in the field of real-time computational learning problems and Dr. Barlow has been for many years a preeminent researcher in brain perception. The results of this research should make an important contribution to understanding the theoretical link between biological and artificial neural networks.